Elon Musk is signaling that Tesla is close to reaching its limit with its HW3 onboard self-driving computer despite having yet to deliver on its self-driving promise.
In 2016, Musk announced that all Tesla vehicles built going forward have “all the hardware to enable self-driving”. At one point, he even specified “level 5 self-driving”, which is the highest level and means capable of driving anywhere, anytime, under any condition.
Shortly after this claim, the CEO signaled that Tesla was most likely wrong as it could need more computing power onboard the vehicle to run the self-driving system.
That’s when Tesla introduced Hardware 3 (HW3).
Musk claimed that this computer would enable self-driving and everyone who bought the Full Self-Driving (FSD) package on prior vehicles, would get a computer retrofit for free (or rather included in the price they paid for FSD).
Since then, Tesla has introduced HW4, a more powerful onboard computer for its vehicles.
Tesla is not offering prior vehicles a retrofit with this new computer as it insists that HW3 is capable to achieve self-driving through future software update.
Last year, Musk went as far as claiming that FSD will get better on HW3 first as Tesla’s “focus needs to be on getting FSD on HW3 working super well and provided internationally”. He went as fas as claiming that FSD performance on “HW4 will lag at least 6 months behind HW3” because of this.
That comment was less than a year ago, but the situation has already reversed.
In new comments amid the release of Tesla FSD v12.5, Musk explained why only HW4 vehicles are now getting the release this week:
We are focusing on just Model Y with HW4 for the initial release. Make sure that works well, then broaden. This has the 5X increase in parameters. HW3 would run the same parameter count, but requires extra work to optimize the code.
The CEO confirmed that HW3 will get the same release, but Tesla now has to optimize it in order to run on the lesser hardware.
This signals that Tesla is reaching the limits of HW3 and unlike what he said last year, HW4 is now being prioritized.
Furthermore, Musk added that Tesla “has yet to unlock the full potential of HW4”, which could get “up to a further 8X increase in parameters.”
But what about HW3?
Electrek’s Take
This is one of Tesla’s biggest liabilities. The CEO has publicly promised level 5 autonomy on all vehicles produced since 2016. Tesla has already been proven wrong with HW2, and now HW3 is seemingly reaching its limit.
Top comment by Gertrud
8 cameras, each with 8 megapixel resolution and 30 fps, generate 5.5 GB of image data (at 8-bit color depth). Every second. Lossy or lossless compression (such as JPEG, WEBP, MPEG, AV1, ...) works fine if you want to store image or video data on a drive. But if you want to analyze the image data, it is 5.5 GB per second. No shortcuts.
With lidar and radar, you get a kind of 3D image (a point cloud) directly from the sensor/device. With cameras, you have to calculate the third dimension (e.g. distances) with different images from at least 2 slightly different camera perspectives.
Many people always said that it is impossible to achieve fully autonomous driving with vision only (cameras only). But humans can drive with just a stereo camera (aka eyes). So I always thought maybe it's possible and worth a try. But I always had doubts that the cars already have enough computing power. They have to process insane amounts of data in real time and on top all the code for labeling and decision making, that is getting more and more complex. If the current software can handle 99 percent of the traffic situation, they will probably have to process 10x more code, to come to 99.99%, which still wouldn't be good enough. Maybe even HW4 hasn't enough computing power for a system, that is good enough to get certified by the authorities.
This is fairly clear from the facts that Tesla needs to optimize the code to run on HW3 while HW4 seemingly still has a lot of room to grow and that it reversed its plan to have HW4 code lag behind HW3 as it focuses on getting everything running on HW3 first as the people who own these vehicles have been waiting longer.
At this point, it’s highly likely that Tesla will never be able to deliver on its self-driving promise on the HW3 car.
What would that look like? We don’t even know how many HW3 vehicles there are out there as Tesla has gradually made the shift over a few years.
What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.
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