Tesla's FSD v12.5 Update HW3 and Beyond

TapTechNews August 22nd news, Tesla has launched the FSD v12.5 update for vehicles equipped with the old HW3 computer.

TapTechNews noted that in 2016, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had promised that all Tesla models produced since then would have the hardware needed to achieve autonomous driving. He even explicitly stated that these vehicles could support the highest level of Level 5 autonomous driving, that is, autonomous driving at any time, place and condition.

However, shortly after, Musk admitted that Tesla might need a more powerful in-vehicle computer to run the autonomous driving system. For this reason, the company launched Hardware 3 (HW3). Musk claimed that HW3 would be able to achieve autonomous driving and all early Tesla owners who purchased the FSD package could upgrade to HW3 for free.

Since then, Tesla has also released a more powerful HW4 computer. But the company said that it would not provide an option to upgrade to HW4 for early models, insisting that HW3 could also achieve autonomous driving through future software updates.

Last year, Musk even said that FSD would perform better on HW3 because Tesla needs to focus on making FSD run extremely well on HW3 and provide it to the world. He also claimed that for this reason, the performance of FSD on HW4 would be at least six months behind HW3.

However, Tesla quickly changed this strategy. FSD v12.5 was first deployed on new models equipped with HW4, and Musk said that Tesla needed more time to optimize the code to adapt to HW3.

This shows that Tesla is approaching the performance limit of HW3, and FSD v12.5 is still far from the unsupervised autonomous driving ability that Tesla has been promising to HW3 owners since 2016.

Now Tesla has begun to push a new software update (2024.26.15), which brings FSD v12.5 to Tesla vehicles equipped with HW3. This update was released 23 days after Musk previously said it would take 10 days to optimize for HW3.

Musk also claimed that versions 12.4 and 12.5 would no longer have a steering wheel touch prompt and would be able to travel 5 to 10 times more miles before requiring an intervention. However, crowdsourced data shows that the number of miles between each intervention has only increased by less than twice.