Tesla has released a new version of their (supervised) Full Self-Driving FSD v12.5 for vehicles with the older HW3 computer.
In 2016, Musk announced that all future Tesla cars would have “all the hardware to enable self-driving,” and at one point even went so far as to say “Level 5 self-driving,” the highest level, meaning the car could drive anywhere, anytime, under any circumstances.
Shortly after this claim, the CEO suggested that Tesla was probably wrong because vehicles would likely need more computing power to run a self-driving system.
That’s when Tesla introduced Hardware 3 (HW3).
Musk claimed that this computer would enable autonomous driving, and that anyone who bought the Full Self-Driving (FSD) package for the previous vehicle would get the computer retrofit for free (or included in the price they paid for FSD).
Since then, Tesla has introduced an even more powerful on-board computer for their vehicles, the HW4.
Tesla claims that the HW3 will be able to achieve self-driving through a future software update, so it’s not offering to retrofit older vehicles with the new computer.
Last year, Musk claimed that FSD would be improved on HW3 first, saying that Tesla “needs to focus on getting HW3’s FSD working really well and offering it internationally. Because of this, Musk went so far as to claim that “HW4’s FSD performance will be at least six months behind HW3.”
Tesla quickly reversed this strategy: With the release of FSD v12.5, Musk said Tesla would first deploy the software on newer HW4 vehicles, and that it needed more time to optimize the code to work on older HW3 vehicles.
As we’ve said before, this shows that Tesla is getting close to the limits of HW3, but FSD v12.5 still isn’t anywhere near the unsupervised self-driving capabilities that Tesla has been promising HW3 owners since 2016.
Now, Tesla has started rolling out a new software update (2024.26.15) that introduces FSd v12.5 to Tesla vehicles equipped with HW3.
The update comes 23 days after Musk claimed it would take 10 days to adapt the HW3 code.
Musk also claimed that the 12.4 and 12.5 have no steering noises and can travel “five to 10 times the distance with one intervention.”
As we have previously reported, crowdsourced data shows less than a two-fold improvement in miles between interventions.
Electrek’s take
Again, I am beginning to have very serious doubts about whether Tesla can deliver on their FSd promises with HW3.
To achieve an unsupervised self-driving system, we need a 50x to 100x improvement in miles between interventions from v12.5.
At this point, it’s taken a month of optimizing the code that’s nowhere near unsupervised self-driving, and I fear the situation will only get worse as Tesla adds more parameters to the FSD.
While all this is happening, Elon’s followers have begun spreading the false claim that people with HW3 were never promised an unsupervised self-driving system.
This is a complete lie, and seems set to get Tesla past an announcement that the HW3 will not support unsupervised Level 4 or 5 autonomy.
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