After recently updating its onboard media computer, new Tesla owners have been experiencing a significantly more responsive center display in the Model S and Model X. So much better that other Tesla owners have been thinking of updating their vehicles.
Now CEO Elon Musk says that they are able to upgrade the hardware, but owners might want to wait since a new software update could make the difference.
Earlier today, we shared a controlled comparison test of the old MCU versus the new MCU and it showed that the new hardware makes the user experience about twice as fast.
It brings the responsiveness of the center screen to a similar level of the Model 3, which also features a new media computer.
But you don’t need a Model 3 or a new Model S or Model X to get the same performance.
On Twitter, Musk confirmed that current Model S and Model X owners can pay to upgrade their MCU:
Yes, you can upgrade hardware, although we also wrote software to accelerate rendering on old MCU. Coming out soon & makes a big diff.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 27, 2018
Musk also confirmed that a new update will improve the performance on the older MCU without any hardware upgrade.
It will be interesting to see how close it can get to the new MCU only with software improvements.
As for the MCU upgrade, we reached out to Tesla about the cost of the retrofit. We’ll update this post if we get a response.
Electrek’s Take
That’s a lot of software updates coming out “soon”.
Musk also said that the new navigation and maps engine is coming this weekend and now new improvements to the rendering performance are apparently lined up.
Tesla previously said that Model 3 software development has been slowing down their software updates for Model S and Model X.
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