4.5 million Teslas might not be able to reliably run future FSD software
Hardware 4 is coming and it will make current vehicles obsolete
With the first Hardware 4 vehicles on the roads, questions arise about if the current 4.5 million Teslas that are around today will be able to run effectively the future versions of Full Self Driving software models that are coming out of Tesla’s supercomputers.
A Foundation for Autonomous Driving
To understand Tesla’s journey towards full self driving, we must first examine the foundation upon which it was built. Tesla has been including Hardware 3 into all their vehicles for almost the last decade. This advanced hardware includes a set of sensors (cameras, radar and ultrasonic sensors) plus a computer which provides the capability to run Tesla’s full self driving software. In the last few years some of these sensors have been removed both from the production lines and from the software leaving the system on vision only. Elon Musk proclaimed that Hardware 3 would empower cars to navigate autonomously, surpassing human drivers in safety by at least tenfold.
Central to this system are eight low-resolution cameras that act as the vehicle’s eyes, capturing the surrounding environment. Utilizing the data recorded by these…
