Tesla’s Full Self-Driving v12.5 rollout on HW3 failed, what happens next?

Tesla’s rollout of Full Self-Driving v12.5 has failed so far, and owners want to know what happens next?

In 2016, Elon Musk announced that all future Tesla vehicles would come equipped with the necessary hardware for self-driving capabilities, even specifying “level 5 self-driving,” which implies the ability to operate autonomously under any conditions. However, shortly after, Musk acknowledged that Tesla might require more onboard computing power than initially thought, leading to the introduction of Hardware 3 (HW3).

Musk assured that HW3 would enable full self-driving (FSD) capabilities, promising retrofits for earlier models that had purchased the FSD package. Following this, Tesla introduced Hardware 4 (HW4), a more advanced onboard computer system, but did not offer retrofits for older models with HW3, maintaining that HW3 was sufficient for achieving self-driving through software updates.

Initially, Musk claimed that FSD improvements would first be optimized for HW3, suggesting that HW4 might lag behind by at least six months. However, Tesla reversed this approach with the release of FSD version 12.5, which was first deployed to HW4 vehicles. Musk explained that optimizing the software for the less powerful HW3 would take additional time, hinting at the limitations of HW3 in handling the latest software advancements towards unsupervised self-driving, a capability Tesla promised to HW3 owners since 2016.

This rewrite aims to streamline the narrative, focusing on the evolution of Tesla’s self-driving hardware and software, and the strategic shifts in deployment and optimization of FSD capabilities between HW3 and HW4.

Musk said that it would take ten days to adapt v12.5 to HW3.

In late August, about two weeks after Musk’s “10 days” had passed, we reported that Tesla started to push v12.5 to HW3 vehicles.

Not only was the update to HW3 late, but Tesla also confirmed that it was running a smaller model than on HW4.

On top of all that, now three weeks later, Tesla has yet to push v12.5 to the vast majority of FSD vehicles with HW3. Tesla appears to only have pushed v12.5.1.5 to some Tesla HW3 owners and it is now moving HW4 cars to v12.5.2.

Social media and Tesla forums are full of Tesla HW3 owners asking why they haven’t released a new update since v12.3.6 earlier this year despite Musk’s comments.

In its “AI roadmap” released last week, Tesla now claims that HW3 will get the same release as HW4 starting with v12.5.2 this month.

However, v12.5.2 is already in the consumer fleet for HW4 cars and v12.5.3 is already being tested in the beta fleet.

Electrek’s Take

This article is mainly to correct our article from last month that claimed Tesla was pushing v12.5 to HW3 since it turned out to be a very limited release.

Earlier this year, Elon said that Tesla was not compute-constrained for training FSD anymore. He also claimed that the training compute combined with v12’s full end-to-end neural nets would enable much faster software improvements.

And yet, the vast majority of HW3 owners have only received v12.3.6 this year.

That, combined with the fact that Tesla’s AI roadmap makes no mention of unsupervised self-driving whatsoever, and Tesla seemingly stopped promising it on new cars, has completely killed my hopes of Tesla delivering on its self-driving promises on HW3 cars and it has greatly limited by hopes of the same for HW4 cars.

I wouldn’t be shocked if Tesla fully shifts its self-driving strategy to the dedicated robotaxi, but I have no idea how they plan to make HW3 and possibly HW4 owners whole.