Elon Musk says the main thing holding back Tesla Robotaxi’s nighttime hours is that the cars have a hard time seeing pets in the dark. His example was “gray kittens on gray asphalt.”
That’s a low-light, low-contrast detection problem, which is the weakness of textbook cameras and exactly what lidar and radar handle. Musk has spent years calling such sensors a “crutch” and “nonsense.”
Robotaxi has one more hour and Musk explains why it is just one
On Friday night, Tesla’s Robotaxi account announced that the Austin service “is now available until 11 p.m.” Until now it closed at 10 p.m.
Musk reposted the ad and explained what’s keeping cars off the road later:
“The main thing we’re trying to figure out is making sure we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night. We’re literally trying to avoid gray kittens on gray asphalt in the dark.”
A little context about that extra hour. When Tesla launched Robotaxi in Austin in June 2025, the app accepted ride requests from 6 a.m. to midnight. Fifteen months later, the service closes an hour earlier than on the first day.
And it’s a small service. Tesla has barely climbed since its launch, even with the addition of Cybercabs last month.
Cameras need light and contrast. Lidar and radar not
A camera is a passive sensor. It works with any light that bounces off an object and distinguishes that object based on its separation from the background. A gray animal on gray pavement at night gives you very little of either.
Lidar is an active sensor. It fires its own laser pulses and measures the time it takes for them to return, giving the car a distance and 3D shape for whatever is on the road. It works the same at midnight as it does at noon, and it doesn’t need the kitten to be a different color than the asphalt. You need the kitten to get off the road, and kittens, being three-dimensional objects, tend to do that.
Radar does similar work with radio waves and adds speed. It’s weaker for something so small, but still works in the fog, dust, and glare that blind cameras.
All companies making large-scale self-driving vehicles use all three. Waymo’s sixth generation system has 13 cameras, 4 lidars and 6 radars. In August, Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov showed children chasing dogs across a pitch-black street, where the camera feed was nearly useless and the lidar view was clean. Waymo’s approximately 4,000 driverless vehicles operate 24 hours a day.
Tesla took the other path. It removed radar from its cars in May 2021, removed ultrasonic sensors in 2022, and has never shipped a car with lidar.
Musk’s track record on lidar and night vision
Musk in April 2019: “Lidar is nonsense. Anyone who trusts Lidar is doomed.”
In February 2022, he called lidar “a seductive local maximum” and said that a general solution to autonomous driving “will necessarily require silicon cameras and neural networks.”
In August 2025, he went further and stated that “lidar and radar reduce security due to sensor containment.”
And in May of this year, he posted a “photon count reconstruction” image of Tesla’s cameras and wrote: “This is why the Tesla FSD can see so well at night or in extreme glare.”
That was five months ago, and now seeing at night is “the main thing” Tesla is trying to solve.
He knew the trade-off from the beginning. When Tesla was pulling radar in 2021, Musk told Electrek in direct messages that “high-resolution radar vision would be better than pure vision.” And NHTSA is currently investigating 3.2 million Teslas for FSD crashes in low visibility conditions, an investigation in which it demanded an internal Tesla document titled “Radar Saves Us.”
Electrek’s opinion
Musk wrote that post as if Tesla had just found a new problem. It wasn’t like that. Cameras missing dark, low-contrast objects at night is the oldest limitation in the book, and it’s the reason everyone else puts lidar and radar in their cars. Ten years ago this month, Tesla said every car it made had the hardware for fully autonomous driving. Its CEO will realize in October 2026 that gray things are hard to see in the dark.
And Musk chose the cutest example available. The same physics applies to a tire tread on the road or a child in a black hoodie. They are larger and easier to detect, but no one should want the margin of safety to be “bigger than a kitten’s.”
To be fair, no sensor set takes this to zero. A Waymo hit a warehouse cat in San Francisco last October, and Waymo said it dove under the car as it drove away. But Tesla is the only one whose CEO says the cars have trouble seeing the animal in the first place.
The cost excuse also disappeared. Rivian said this week that lidar now costs it “a few hundred dollars” per vehicle.
What bothers us the most is the part that Musk skipped. The sun sets a little after 7 pm in Austin right now, so Tesla’s Robotaxis are already driving in the dark every night with a problem he says is unresolved. And customers’ Teslas run “fully autonomous driving” on the same cameras around the clock, without a curfew.
Tesla is now one update away from returning to the midnight closing time on launch day. Waymo, with lidar and radar in every car, never closes. How many more updates than an hour before Tesla admits there is a sensor for that?
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