Elon Musk finally admits Tesla’s HW3 might not support full self-driving

Elon Musk finally admits Tesla’s HW3 might not support full self-driving and that he doesn’t actually know what it will take.

Millions of Tesla vehicles are equipped with HW3 computers.

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.

CEO Elon Musk finally took a first step in that direction during the conference call following the release of Tesla’s Q3 2024 financial results.

The CEO said when asked about Tesla achieving its promised unsupervised self-driving on HW3 vehicles:

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.

This is the first time that Musk admitted that HW3 could potentially not support unsupervised self-driving.

However, as we previously reported, Tesla is currently using both NN nodes on HW3 even though one was originally meant as redundancy, which you need to achieve Tesla’s promised level 4-5 autonomy.

This makes it virtually impossible for Tesla to deliver on its promise as Tesla would need to keep developing software to solve self-driving, which is still far from accomplishing, and then not only have it on HW3, but optimize it enough to fit on a single node.

He said that Tesla would offer a computer upgrade if Tesla found out for sure that it couldn’t deliver on HW3:

If that turns out to be the case, we will upgrade those who bought HW3 FSD for free. And we have designed the system to be upgradable.

While the system is indeed “upgradable”, as Musk himself previously stated, HW3 can’t be upgraded to HW4 as it currently exist.

He said it wouldn’t make sense, and he is right. We know that HW4 uses different power and camera harnesses. The whole computer is also a different form factor that would make it hard to fit where the HW3 is installed.

Tesla would need to design a new version of the HW4 that can be retrofitted into HW3 cars.

Musk insists that HW3 cameras are “capable”, even though HW4 cameras have about 5x more megapixels, which would point to him seeing the compute power as the bigger issue.

Electrek’s Take

I think the more critical comment is this:

“We don’t actually know the answer to that.”

Again, I’d venture to say that this is not true. They know the answer and the answer is no for the reasons stated above, but even if that was an accurate statement, it should be worrying.

Elon admits that he, or Tesla really, doesn’t know precisely what it takes to get to full autonomy. That should be clear to anyone who has been following his comments on it for years. He said every year for the last 5 years that Tesla would solve autonomy by the end of the year.

Now, he is confident that this will happen next year, and we should believe him. Why?

The facts are that Tesla was wrong about the fact that HW2.5 is capable of self-driving. It was wrong about HW3 being capable of self-driving, and it is very likely wrong about HW4 being capable of self-driving. At the very least, it won’t know for sure until it solves it.

If that’s the case, why is Tesla selling the “Full Self-Driving” package and saying it will happen next year?