Tesla has secured a deal with the electronic components unit of Samsung to supply cameras for the brand’s self-driving systems.
According to The Korea Economic Daily, the deal with Samsung Electro-Mechanics is estimated to be worth between 4 trillion won and 5 trillion won ($3.2 billion-$4 billion).
Samsung beat out LG Innotek and Primax Electronics to win the contract with Tesla, but this isn’t the first time the Korean electronics maker has partnered with the American automaker to make vehicle components. In September 2021, Samsung was also awarded a contract to supply Tesla with the next-generation Full Self-Driving 4.0 chip, and in July it won a $436 million contract to supply camera modules for a new model which is rumored to be the Cybertruck.
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LG Innotek will still supply 20 percent of the cameras for the system, but Samsung will supply the majority of 80 percent as per the agreement. The cameras will be used in every Tesla model, namely the Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, and the upcoming Cybertruck.
Cameras are a huge part of Tesla’s technological advancement, utilizing them for its Full Self Driving system to create imagery for its “neural nets”, rather than using Lidar or radar as other automakers do.
Eight cameras with an estimated 1.2 million megapixels are used for the latest version of FSD, and a switch to Samsung cameras could bump that number up to 5 million megapixels, representing a huge increase in image quality.
The investment seems to double down on Tesla’s plan to achieve self-driving with solely camera-based vision, despite recent reports that the brand had filed with the FCC to use a new radar system.
