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Tesla safety tech takes giant step with FCC approval for wave sensor
Tesla’s request for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to approve a millimeter-wave sensor for child protection and anti-theft measures has been granted. Along with five other companies, Tesla received “a grant of waivers” on April 14, 2021, that would allow the installation of radar sensors in the 57-64 GHz frequency band in passenger motor vehicles. The system is now likely to contribute to the imminent release of a driver monitoring system, which would keep drivers attentive during the use of the company’s Full Self-Driving suite.
The document also granted Vayyar Imaging Ltd., Valeo North America, Infineon Technologies America Corp, IEE Sensing Inc., and Brose North America to use millimeter-wave sensors. Tesla and IEE were approved for 60-64 GHz, while the other companies can utilize 57-64 GHz.
Millimeter-Wave Sensor
In August 2020, Teslarati reported that Tesla had requested the FCC to approve a short-range motion sensor that would save kids from being left in hot cars. The sensor would also boost the company’s theft-prevention system as it would be active “approximately 6 feet” outside of the vehicle “to provide vehicle security benefits such as detecting a broken window or a vehicle intrusion.” Tesla originally filed for a request for a waiver on July 31, 2020.
After a few months of research and deliberation, the FCC is waiving requirements that would prohibit the approval of these systems. The government agency says that “We find that grant of these waivers…will bring immediate relief to the industry and the public in this area. Specifically, our action will bring forth substantial public benefits by improving vehicular safety for children and providing opportunities for additional vehicular automation and theft prevention applications without increasing the potential for harmful interference to authorized users in the band.”
The Sensor’s use for Driver Monitoring for Full Self-Driving
New FCC documents obtained by Teslarati indicate that Tesla’s device “will use 4 transmit and 3 receive antennas driven by a highly configurable radar front-end unit and in-vehicle radar modulation will consist of consecutive frames, including an acquisition sequence comprised by a repetition of frequency chirps or stepped chirps, a listening period, then a period for signal processing.” However, there may be more uses for the sensor, which aligns with the company’s current plans to monitor driver behavior and attentiveness during the use of Autopilot or Full Self-Driving.
The documents state:
“Tesla identifies some potential use cases—child detection, cabin intrusion, and exterior detection—for which sensing would occur only while the vehicle is stationary; and other use cases—occupant detection and classification—for which the device would sense both while the vehicle is stationary and while in motion; and one use case—driver’s vital signs monitoring—for which the device would sense only while the vehicle is in motion.”
The device, along with the vehicle’s interior cabin camera, will monitor facial features and vital signs to ensure that a driver is paying attention. Tesla recently revoked access to its FSD Beta program to some owners as they did not remain sufficiently attentive while utilizing the FSD Suite.
Tesla officially expands FSD Beta test field while revoking access to the irresponsible
In early April, Tesla hacker green released footage of the Driver Monitoring system, showing how the interior cabin camera would constantly look at the driver’s facial features. This would ensure that a driver using the FSD or Autopilot systems is still paying attention to the road. Because Tesla’s FSD isn’t operating with Level 5 autonomy, it still requires the driver to pay attention to the road and the vehicle’s surroundings.
By popular demand, night footage with Tesla DMS detections.
It’s not perfect but workable with street lights and whatnot (as suspected)
Full 23.5 minutes footage on youtube: https://t.co/AZSpN3ZoFi
No idea why Dark/blinded top out at 50% only.
reworked display.@rice_fry pic.twitter.com/FiF6i33XGZ— green (@greentheonly) April 8, 2021
Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety believe that the inclusion of the sensor could be highly advantageous for autonomous vehicles. “The ability of a vehicle to detect and classify all occupants will likely be critical as autonomous vehicles (AVs) are deployed onto our roads in the future… because…AVs will need to know the number of occupants and whether they are properly restrained before beginning to move,” safety advocates said.
Child Safety and Anti-Theft Devices
The device was originally going to be used to detect children left in a hot car. The system “provides depth perception and can ‘see’ through soft materials, such as a blanket covering a child in a child restraint,” according to Tesla’s original filing. The device “can differentiate between a child and an object left on the seat, reducing the likelihood of false alarms,” Tesla said. It can also detect “micromovements like breathing patterns and heart rates, neither of which can be captured by cameras or in-seat sensors alone.” Google was granted the use of a device “under the same technical parameters” by the FCC in 2018.
The device would also be able to detect intrusions of theft attempts, which could be coupled with the highly effective Tesla Sentry Mode. Sentry Mode records events that occur near the vehicle and has helped police crack several vandalism and robbery cases in the past.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that 105 kids were killed in 2018 and 2019 because of being left in a hot car. The death occurred 54% of the time because someone forgot their child was in the car. The approval of the millimeter-wave sensor could decrease that number significantly if it receives widespread approval after Tesla’s usage.
The use of the sensor is immediately effective. “Accordingly, pursuant to authority in Sections 0.31, 0.241, and 1.3 of the Commission’s rules, 47 CFR §§ 0.21, 0.241, and 1.3, and Sections 4(i), 302, 303(e), and 303(r) of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, 47 U.S.C. §§ 154(i), 302, 303(e), and 303(r), IT IS ORDERED that the Request for Waiver filed by Tesla Inc. IS GRANTED, consistent with the terms of this Order. This action is effective upon release of this Order.”
The FCC’s grant documentation is available below.
DA-21-407A1 (1) by Joey Klender on Scribd
Tesla Full Self-Driving’s release in Europe is set to be delayed by at least a few months.
The European Union will not vote on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) on October 6. The draft agenda for the 119th meeting of the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles lists only a 25-minute “continuation of discussions” on the Netherlands’ Article 39 request, not a decision. The next scheduled TCMV session is in December, which is now the earliest date a bloc-wide vote could occur.
Tesla Europe had pointed to October 6 as a possible EU-wide vote after the Dutch vehicle authority RDW granted the first European type approval on April 10.
That approval, under UN Regulation 171 plus an Article 39 exemption in EU Regulation 2018/858, is the legal file other member states have been recognizing one by one. The same committee has already discussed the request twice without voting.
Elon Musk’s reply to the delay was a single word: “Sigh.”
Sigh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 25, 2026
Seven EU countries have now cleared FSD Supervised on their own roads: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, and Czechia. Those seven states represent about 53 million people, or roughly 12 percent of the EU population. An EU-wide authorization still needs a qualified majority: at least 15 of 27 member states representing 65 percent of the bloc’s population, about 292 million people.
Germany, France, Italy, and Spain remain the decisive markets. France has already rejected the current system; several other governments have flagged speed-limit compliance as the main sticking point.
The safety case Tesla is putting in front of those governments is now public. On September 1, Tesla Europe said FSD Supervised was in use by more than 70,000 customers, covering over 1 million kilometers a day, and was 4.1 times less likely to be involved in a crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on EU public roads.
An earlier mid-year cut of the same fleet data, covering 65 million kilometers in five approved countries, put the collision advantage at 5.2 times, with zero highway collisions over 41.9 million kilometers. Tesla also reported far fewer automatic emergency braking events, harsh accelerations, and hard swerves than in comparable manual Tesla driving. Those figures are company-reported, not independently audited.
Tesla Full Self-Driving is taking over Europe: fourth country gets FSD approval
The public-health backdrop is harder to dispute. European countries recorded about 19,400 road deaths in 2025, or roughly 53 a day, most of them attributed to human error. FSD Supervised is not unsupervised autonomy; the driver remains legally responsible. But the software is already legal and in daily use across seven member states.
Until TCMV votes, the rest of the EU remains a patchwork: available in Prague and Amsterdam, locked behind review in Paris and Berlin. December is now the next chance to close that gap.
News
SpaceX readies Starship Flight 14 for a historic journey into uncharted territory
SpaceX finished Starship’s Flight 14 rehearsal, clearing the way for its first orbital flight Monday.
SpaceX has cleared one of the last hurdles before Starship’s first trip to orbit. The company posted on X Thursday afternoon that its launch rehearsal for Flight 14 was complete, keeping the mission on track for Monday, September 28. The launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. CT at Starbase, Texas, and runs for 75 minutes.
A wet dress rehearsal is essentially launch day without the launch. Crews fill Booster 21 and Ship 41 with thousands of tons of extremely cold propellant, run the countdown nearly to ignition, then drain everything back out. It lets engineers catch leaks or equipment problems before anything leaves the pad. SpaceX still needs a launch license from the FAA before the stack, which stands 407 feet tall, can fly.
Flight 14 matters because of where it is going. All 13 previous Starship flights followed a suborbital path, which works like throwing a ball extremely high and far: the vehicle reaches space, but it is always on a course that brings it back down within about an hour. This time, Ship 41 will perform a short engine firing called an orbital insertion burn roughly 25 minutes after liftoff, giving it enough speed to keep falling around Earth instead of back into it. SpaceX plans about six laps at an altitude near 275 kilometers (171 miles) over nearly 10 hours, as Teslarati detailed when the mission was first announced.
Launch rehearsal complete ahead of Starship Flight 14 pic.twitter.com/h5LBYyBqi4
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 24, 2026
Getting into orbit also means Starship has to prove it can get back out. The ship must relight a single Raptor engine in space to slow down for reentry. SpaceX says it will only attempt the orbital insertion burn after flight controllers confirm the hardware needed for that return burn has enough backup, and its flight plan includes health checks that could shorten the mission to two or five orbits.
Flight 14 is also the first to put working satellites into service. Flight 13 carried 20 Starlink V3 satellites in July, but they came back down with the ship because that mission never reached orbit. This time, 26 V3 satellites are meant to stay up and join the constellation within a few weeks. Together they add about 26 terabits per second of network capacity, which SpaceX says is roughly 10 times what a single Falcon 9 launch of older V2 Mini satellites adds. Three of them carry cameras that will photograph Starship’s heat shield in orbit to check for tile damage before reentry.
The hardware has changed too. Ship 41 flies with extra fasteners on tiles in the most vulnerable areas, fixes for gaps where superheated plasma slipped behind tiles, and curved tiles designed to reduce heating between them. Two tiles recovered from Ship 40 will fly again, the first reuse of any part of a Starship heat shield. Booster 21 carries better engine filtering and new relight software after ice clogged three center engines on the previous booster, leaving only eight of 13 engines to restart for its landing burn.
Ship 41 is targeting a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile, a new recovery zone after several Indian Ocean landings, while Booster 21 aims for the Gulf. Neither will be caught by the tower on this flight. Elon Musk said in August that a ship catch was likely “in a few months.”
Elon Musk
Google just picked SpaceX for its first step into orbital AI
Google will launch its first Project Suncatcher AI satellite on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare next week.
Google is about to put its own AI chips into orbit for the first time, and it is paying SpaceX to get them there.
The company said Thursday that the first in-orbit test of Project Suncatcher, its research effort to find out whether space can host large-scale AI computing, will fly next week on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission.
The satellite, called MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator and carries four of Google’s Tensor Processing Units, the same chips Google runs in its ground data centers. Google originally planned to launch two custom satellites in 2027, but chose to move faster by integrating its chips into a satellite.
MVP’s solar panels supply about one kilowatt of power, and Google will run Gemini models on the TPUs only in bursts of roughly 15 minutes before the chips shut down so the radiators can shed heat. In a blog post, Google said its Trillium TPUs survived vibration testing that mimicked sustained launch loads of up to 10g, with individual components seeing 50 to 100g, and handled a radiation dose greater than a five year mission would deliver.
SpaceX and Google mull massive partnership on Musk’s orbital data dream: report
Next week’s flight, slated for October 1, follows a relationship that became public in May, when Teslarati reported that Google was in talks with SpaceX for a launch deal tied to orbital data centers. Google also holds a stake of roughly 6% in SpaceX.
The two companies are chasing the same idea from very different starting points. SpaceX’s own orbital compute program is built around the AI1 satellite, a roughly 70 meter structure derived from Starlink V3 hardware that is designed for 150 kW of peak compute, about 150 times the power MVP will draw. Elon Musk has brushed off concerns about crowding orbit with those satellites, and SpaceX is building its Gigasat factory in Bastrop, Texas, to produce them, targeting an annualized rate of about 1 GW of space compute by the end of 2027.
Musk also posted on X on Thursday that “the amount of compute in space will obviously round up to 100% of all compute.”
Google has been more cautious in public. Its research estimates that launch prices need to fall below about $200 per kilogram before an orbital data center can compete with a ground facility on energy cost, a threshold the company believes could be reached around the mid 2030s. The Suncatcher team has said it expects the effort to remain a project rather than a product for years, which leaves the first real test of its hardware riding on a rocket from the company with the most aggressive timeline in the field.
Tesla Full Self-Driving release in the EU gets delayed
SpaceX readies Starship Flight 14 for a historic journey into uncharted territory
