Tesla launches FSD v12.5 on HW3 vehicles

Tesla has launched a new version of its (supervised) Full Self-Driving FSD v12.5 on vehicles equipped with the older HW3 computer.

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.

Tesla quickly reversed this strategy. With the release of FSD v12.5, Tesla deployed the software first to the newer HW4 vehicle, and Musk said that Tesla would need more time to optimize the code to work on the older HW3.

As we previously reported, this signaled that Telsa is getting closer to reaching the limits of HW3 while FSD v12.5 is nowhere near ready for the unsupervised self-driving capability that Tesla has been promising to those HW3 owners since 2016.

Now, Tesla has started to push a new software update (2024.26.15) that reportedly brings FSd v12.5 to Tesla vehicles equipped with the HW3.

The update comes 23 days after Musk claimed it would take 10 days to adapt the code for HW3.

Musk also claimed that 12.4 and 12.5 will come without steering wheel nag and it will be able to drive “5 to 10x more miles per intervention“.

As we previously reported, crowdsource data shows a less than 2x improvement in miles between interventions.

Electrek’s Take

Again, I’m starting to have very serious doubts that Tesla will ever be able to deliver its FSd promises on HW3.

To deliver an unsupervised self-driving system, we need a 50X to 100X improvement in miles between interventions from v12.5.

If it is now taking a month to optimize a code that is nowhere near unsupervised self-driving, I fear it will get worse as Tesla adds more parameters to FSD.

While this is happening, we have Elon’s sycophants starting to push the false narrative that an unsupervised self-driving system was never promised to people with HW3:

That’s a complete lie and it looks to set the stage for Tesla navigating the announcement that HW3 won’t support unsupervised level 4 or 5 autonomy.