After promising full self-driving updates for years, Elon Musk finally admits that most existing Teslas may never be able to drive themselves
Pretty much every year for the last five years, Elon Musk has promised that a full self-driving update for existing Tesla cars was just a year or so away. But now the Tesla CEO has dramatically changed his tune. It may not happen, after all.
In a conference call discussing the electric car company's financial results (via Electrek) Musk dropped a veritable bomb when he said, «there is some chance that HW3 does not achieve the safety level that allows for unsupervised FSD.»
To unpick that statement, «HW3» refers to the self-driving computer that Tesla began fitting to its models since 2019, while «FSD» refers to Full Self Driving and in turn broadly indicates what's known as Level 4 and 5 autonomous driving.
For the record, Level 4 enables fully autonomous driving within a limited geo-fenced area. Typically, you'll still need a driver on board, plus controls. Meanwhile, Level 5 is the ultimate autonomous solution, the full no-driver, no-steering-wheel, go-anywhere experience.
So, the point is that Musk has been promising an «FSD» update for HW3-equipped Teslas for years. And now he's saying that may no longer be the case. Indeed, Musk has said, «we don't actually know the answer» to the question of whether HW3 can eventually be made FSD-capable.
If this sounds like a total disaster, in mitigation Musk says that Tesla owners with HW3 installed will be offered a free upgrade to the latest HW4 self-driving computer, introduced last year.
«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,» Musk said of the new self-driving computer.
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Tesla does has form in this area, having implemented a retrofit upgrade from HW2 to HW3 modules for some cars. Problem is, some observers doubt whether existing Tesla models can actually be upgraded to HW4.
According to Electrek, HW4 has new power and
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