At the same time, vision-only has been Tesla’s long play, and theoretically, getting rid of radar could be beneficial in order to lessen the muddiness in decision making that comes from input from multiple types of sensor.

If radar says one thing and vision says another, who’s right? - A perfect example is issues with phantom braking. It’s known it occurs when radar incorrectly senses something within its vertical line of “sight” like an overpass. Vision won’t have this issue, because while radar says “a thing is x feet away,” vision says “an overpass is 10 feet away, and I don’t need to stop for an overpass.”

It’s less dependent on camera quality (as cameras in pretty much any modern Tesla, while not top of the line, aren’t awful) and more dependent on the post processing and decision making algorithms - which Tesla is generally good at. When you’ve got 8 cameras around the car versus a few radar sensors in the front, you might as well be taking input from where there’s more data that can be contextually processed.

I definitely think this isn’t a great move today, and it’s almost certainly because they can’t source sensors right now. But at the same time, this has been their long term m.o. for all their self driving stuff.