Elon Musk finally admits that Tesla will have to replace its HW3 self-driving computers. He said it would be difficult, but Tesla would do it.
However, no concrete plan has been
For the better part of the year, we have been reporting that Tesla can’t achieve its promise of “full self-driving on HW3, and it needs to come clean about it.
Last October, Tesla CEO Elon Musk finally admitted that it might be the case, but he didn’t want to commit fully:
We are not 100% sure. HW4 has several times the capability of HW3. It’s easier to get things to work on HW4 and it takes a lot of efforts to squeeze that into HW3. There is some chance that HW3 does not achieve the safety level that allows for unsupervised FSD.
Today, just 3 months later, Tesla’s management was asked about the HW3 situation again.
Tesla’s head of FSD, Ashok Elluswamy, first responded that they “are not giving up on it”, but then Musk corrected him saying that “the truth is that we will need to replace all HW3 computers in vehicles where FSD was purchased.”
He said that Tesla would replace them for free, but he specified that it will only be for people who bought the up to $15,000 Full Self-Driving package.
That could prove problematic as Tesla always promised that “all cars produced since 2016 are capable of Full Self-Driving” – not just the ones who paid for the software.
Top comment by andrewp
The older cars have lower res cameras too, so even with a computer swap it would still be a different rev of software due to the limited resolution of the cameras on those cars, the image recognition will be different and part of going to a higher res cam was to fix the issue of the lower res cams making it difficult for the computer to read and identify LED signage among other things.
So will they need to swap cams as well, and if they don't will the ability of the older cars be worse?
Combine that with the fact that the FW4 boards that have been failing show that it's possible to have a single point failure that takes out the entire board meaning it doesn't have compute redundancy after all. Imagine a board failing while on the highway in traffic at 60 or 70mp. It wouldn't be able to even pull over safely. It would require driver intervention or there would be an accident. So no full autonomy of level 4 or 5 is possible.
Tesla already had to upgrade computers on older vehicles built between 2016 and 2018 that had older HW2.5 computers. Again, Tesla only offered HW3 retrofits for people who bought the FSD software package and it was proven wrong in court.
In fact, Tesla was sued by an owner who had a HW2.5 vehicle and wanted to use the monthly FSD subscription. Tesla wanted to charge him for the computer retrofit to make the FSD work on his car. He took them to court over the claim that “all cars produced since 2016 are capable of Full Self-Driving” and the judge sided with the owner, forcing Tesla to pay for the retrofit.
Tesla could technically find itself having to do that on millions of HW3 vehicles now.
Furthermore, Tesla will have to design a new computer to retrofit vehicles equipped with HW3 computers since the HW4 computer in its latest vehicles is not retrofittable for the HW3 cars.
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