Elon Musk Confirms No FSD For HW4 Vehicles (Perhaps Until 2025) as Tesla Prioritizes Solving FSD on HW3 Globally

Elon Musk has made solving level 5 full self-driving the top priority at Tesla. Musk views this task so crucial that he considers it should be one of the two biggest problems taking up space in his brain. 

The second most important task according to Musk is building SpaceX’s Starship rocket which is expected to make humanity a multi-planetary species.

Going back to earth, Tesla engineers are working incredibly hard to get customers the next version of the FSD software. This version, dubbed FSD v12 will be the first iteration of the FSD software to no longer be considered a “beta” software.

Musk hopes to release FSD v12 later this year and be able to achieve level 5 full self-driving soon after. Although labeled version 12, FSD v12 is actually a completely brand-new neural network architecture. Unlike all previous iterations of FSD software, v12 relies solely on neural networks as opposed to manually written codes to make driving decisions.

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This means there are no hard-coded explicit instructions telling the vehicle to make driving decisions, for example, there is no code that explicitly states what lane lines are or what a traffic light is what to do on a green light, or yellow or red or at a roundabout and so on and so forth.

In the current iteration of FSD, FSD Beta V11, Tesla has 300,000 lines of code giving the vehicle explicit instructions on what to do across a myriad of driving situations. On the other hand, in FSD v12, these instructions are replaced by a neural net that learned from massive amounts of video data and started to make sense of the world including lane lines and traffic lights on its own.

This is extremely impressive however, currently, this version of the software is not available to the wider public. Luckily for us though, yesterday, Musk live-streamed using his phone an FSD v12 drive in Palo Alto, California close to Tesla’s global engineering headquarters.

Although the live stream footage was grainy, we can see the smoothness and human-like characteristics of the new FSD software. Throughout the hour or so drive Musk only needed to take over from the vehicle once.

However, more than the driving footage, during the live stream, Musk also gave us a lot of new insights into Tesla's work to solve level 5 autonomy. A lot of the things we learned were fascinating and included things such as the fact that Tesla is close to bringing online a new 10,000 Nvidia H100 GPU cluster to speed up neural net training.

We also learned that Tesla is already working on bringing FSD v12 to several regions and that the company already has FSD v12 testers on the ground in China, Japan, South Korea, and Europe.

We also received confirmation that Tesla’s HW4, which is the new iteration of the FSD hardware suite that includes a new inference computer, new cameras, and an HD radar, can indeed take better footage. 

This is all exciting, however, during the livestream and in a consequent X post, we also learned a bit of bad news. And the bad news is that Tesla needs to retrain the FSD software from scratch to run on Tesla vehicles with the HW4 sensor suite.

Musk's explanation for why that is necessary is that the new FSD v12 software solely relies on video training data to solve autonomous driving. However, because the cameras are different between HW3 and HW4, Tesla will need to retrain the FSD software from scratch to work on HW4.

This explains why HW4 vehicles currently don’t have access to FSD Beta v11. In a subsequent X post, Musk responded to an X user giving further clarification on Tesla’s timeline to roll out FSD on HW4 vehicles. 

An X user wrote Musk asking “I really want to buy a new Tesla but I don’t know what to get. A 3 or a Y? An S? Will I be stuck without beta for a long time on hardware 4? Are there some product updates imminent? I feel like this shouldn’t be so hard… what do you recommend I buy @elonmusk?”

Musk responded by writing “HW4 software will lag HW3 by at least another six months, as our focus needs to be on getting FSD on HW3 working super well and provided internationally.”

Tesla has been shipping Model Y’s equipped with HW4 autopilot sensor suite for several months now, and owners of those vehicles have been eagerly awaiting to learn when Tesla will enable FSD Beta on their vehicles.

However, Musk’s X post suggests that Tesla has put all available resources into solving level 5 autonomy on HW3 vehicles. This means Tesla will not divert engineering and computational resources to train FSD for HW4 vehicles at least until the EV maker feels like it has solved FSD on HW3.

The 6 months time period Musk put out is likely the amount of time he believes it will take to train the FSD software for HW4 vehicles after Tesla already solves level 5 autonomy for HW3. If we give Tesla the benefit of the doubt and say that the company is able to solve level 5 autonomy internationally on HW3 by the end of next.

Then 6 months from that will push FSD access for HW4 vehicles to the second half of 2025. This means owners of a brand new Model Y might need to wait 2 years until they get access to FSD.

This will undoubtedly come as a disappointment for a lot of Model Y owners however, one bit of good news is that Tesla believes HW3 is capable enough to reach level 5 autonomy. After the introduction of the HW4 computer, there was fear in the Tesla community that Tesla would abandon the over 3 million HW3 vehicles out on the roads for the next-generation sensor suite.

And for the HW4 vehicle owners who might be disappointed by this news, Tesla’s decision to prioritize HW3 at this time makes sense given the fact that there are millions of HW3 vehicles out collecting data that Tesla can use to quickly iterate on the FSD software.

This is as opposed to the few hundred thousand vehicles with HW4 computers out on the roads.

Currently, this is all the information we’ve regarding Tesla’s plans for full self-driving. However, we will be sure to keep you posted when we get further information.

Until then, make sure to visit our site torquenews.com/Tesla regularly for the latest updates.

So what do you think? Disappointed to learn that HW4 Tesla might not get FSD access until 2024? Also, what do you think of Tesla’s decision to prioritize the HW3 sensor suite? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Image: Courtesy of Tesla, Inc.

For more information check out: After Driving a Cybertruck With Fit & Finish Issues, Elon Musk Rallies Tesla Employees To Achieve LEGO Precision

Tinsae Aregay has been following Tesla and The evolution of the EV space on a daily basis for several years. He covers everything about Tesla from the cars to Elon Musk, the energy business, and autonomy. Follow Tinsae on Twitter at @TinsaeAregay for daily Tesla news.