Elon Musk finally admits that Tesla's HW3 may not support full self-driving

Elon Musk finally admits that Tesla's HW3 may not fully support self-driving and that he doesn't really know what it will take.

Millions of Tesla vehicles are equipped with HW3 computers.

For the better part of a year, we've been reporting that Tesla can't deliver on its “fully self-driving HW3” promise, and needs to come clean about it.

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

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

We are not 100% sure. HW4 has several capabilities of HW3. It's easy to get things working on HW4 and it takes a lot of effort to squeeze that into HW3. There is a possibility that the HW3 does not meet the security level that allows unattended FSD.

This is the first time Musk has admitted that the HW3 may not support self-driving.

However, as we previously reported, Tesla is currently using both NN nodes on the HW3 although one was initially intended for redundancy, which is what you need to achieve Tesla's promised 4-5 autonomy.

This makes it impossible for Tesla to fulfill its promise as Tesla will need to continue to develop software to solve self-driving, which is far from being achieved, and not only have it in HW3, but do it well to fit one place.

He said that Tesla will provide computer upgrades if Tesla can confirm that it will not be able to deliver on HW3:

If that is the case, we will upgrade those who purchased the HW3 FSD for free. And we designed the system to evolve.

While the system is indeed “upgradable”, as Musk himself previously stated, HW3 cannot be upgraded to HW4 as it currently stands.

You said it wouldn't be heard, and you're right. We know that the HW4 uses different power and camera harnesses. The whole computer is also a different form factor which can make it difficult to fit where the HW3 is installed.

Tesla will need to design a new version of the HW4 that can be retrofitted to the HW3 vehicles.

Musk insists that the HW3 cameras are “capable”, although the HW4 cameras have 5x more megapixels, which would indicate that he sees computing power as a major problem.

Electrek's Take

I think the most important comments are:

“We really don't know the answer to that.”

Again, I would like 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, we should be concerned.

Elon admits that he, or indeed Tesla, doesn't know exactly what it takes to achieve full autonomy. That should be clear to anyone who has been following his comments about it for years. He said every year for the last 5 years Tesla will settle for independence at the end of the year.

Now, he is sure that this will happen next year, and we have to believe him. Why?

The facts are that Tesla was wrong about the fact that the HW2.5 is self-driving. It was wrong about the HW3 being able to drive itself, and it's probably wrong about the HW4 being able to drive itself. At least, it won't know for sure until it solves it.

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