Knightshade
Well-Known Member
Funny, the dude who claims to work at the gigafactory explicitly said employee test cars do not have HW3 yet, only Tesla-owned test mules (and the very first production we just learned had been made this/last week)
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HW3
- Thread starter Chancellor32
- Start date
Funny, the dude who claims to work at the gigafactory explicitly said employee test cars do not have HW3 yet, only Tesla-owned test mules (and the very first production we just learned had been made this/last week)
From a credible source, I dont think there is any way to know what hardware you have, so even if they do have AP3.
It could also mean that it may not be enabled....
I had forgotten all about that until you mentioned it. I only heard about it for a briefest of period of time and then nada. Isn't that something of a crowded field now...at least by the entrants at CES.
My understanding of that is you wouldn't be able to tell, it is essentially identical to HW2.5 except it's 20x faster so until navigating the GW Bridge in NY or a crowded DC Beltway at rush hour, you'd likely never know. For instance it would be lurching less but lurching is such a relative thing. Perhaps a road segment with a non-uniform arc where currently one could likely perceive course corrections but with HW3 it would make more smaller adjustments. My recollection is the existing hardware (on Model 3) would work perfectly well on EAP.
(My opinion) Hardware 3 IS NOT GOING TO PERFORM BETTER on current iterations of autopilot. Expecting HW3 to lurch less, be more stable, etc. would imply that HW2.5 and even HW2 was a bottleneck. It is the SOFTWARE that would have to be improved.
Remember, HW3 was designed for "full-self driving" a much more demanding task.
In the podcast here after 17:53 Elon talks about HW2.5 vs HW3.0 and how that affects the software. My impression is that HW3 will use different software or at least different software settings for basic AP too without compression, without low frames per second and without other tricks. Also, I think the new software is fairly complete and they have been testing it for a while with the Tesla hardware (Elon calls HW3 the Tesla hardware).
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Not saying this is the case or adding to the rumor mill but it would be funny if they (Tesla) revealed that HW3/AP3 hardware was indeed installed fro the get-go and that its just limited via software.
I would love to see the faces of all the people crying (this is grossly understated) over the HW3/AP3 debacle as this would be utterly priceless.
but this is all conjecture..
I would love to see the faces of all the people crying (this is grossly understated) over the HW3/AP3 debacle as this would be utterly priceless.
but this is all conjecture..
MarcG
Active Member
Polling the Tesla API will tell you which AP Hardware (APH) a Tesla vehicle is installed with, if you look at the APH code:
APH1 = version 1.0
APH2 = version 2.0
APH3 = version 2.5
APH4 = version 3.0
There has been a few inventory S & X models spotted in the wild with APH4, whereas Model 3 cars being delivered up to today still have APH3.
So it looks like Tesla has still been mostly producing vehicles with APH3 (version 2.5) in Q1. This includes my P3D produced in March and just delivered a week ago. Let’s see what Q2 brings!
And it looks like HW 2.5 was a little bit more than a "small" update of "just the computer".
Apparently it included completely different cameras, wiring, and more redundancies (specifically for the NEW radar and servo in the steering wheel).
This would explain how HW2 owners didn't get dashcam. Makes a lot more sense now
I am not employed by Tesla software development, but I did spend 45+ year in software development. Think of fps as the functional equivalent of MIPS, a measure of of fast the processor is. HW3 is 20x faster than HW2.5 That difference is not noticeable with the current workload requirements of the NVIDIA chip. It's plenty fast enough for what it's being asked to process right now. Extrapolating from what Tesla has said that would be insufficient in 9-21 months. Sure, on a highway everyone is doing 65-75. Using 70 as a mean, other activity is occurring at an intercept rate of +/- 5 mph. Basically what happens on an interstate is pretty well choreographed. The interaction speeds are pretty slow and all going in the same direction. I did my undergrad work in Marietta, OH. First time I drove a car there I parked downtown and opened my driver side door just as some young girl was about to go by me. She took the door right off. Imagine multiple bogies, jaywalkers, car doors opening, cars pulling out in traffic My comment about lurching was premised on something I read from Tesla, as I recall. It wasn't a random blogger.
My guess two days ago about HW3 using different software seems to be correct based on Elon's new tweet. When he said the new computer would be slightly disadvantageous, he was obviously talking about the existing EAP features we have now and not about FSD features that are not released yet. To me, this suggests that HW2.0 and HW2.5 development is coming to an end similar to how HW1.0 came to an end. Of course, there will be cosmetic changes but once the switch to HW3.0 is done, they can close the chapter on HW2.0 and HW2.5.
Elon Musk on Twitter
Elon Musk on Twitter
He could be talking about Dashcam, and Sentry mode which are the only two things I'm aware of that don't work on a HW3 vehicle.
But, they also don't work on a HW2 vehicle.
Elon really should have said "more refined for HW2.5".
I find it interesting that Elektrek didn't report on the HW3 news, even though Teslarati did. Because of the screenshots, this was a credible story. Instead, Electrek waited for Tesla or Elon to comment and then reported the comment. If you read Electrek's article, it sure sounds like the switch to HW3 is not happening now, because of these two clues:
I'm suspicious because of these two articles from 2016:
11 Aug 2016: Tesla Autopilot 2.0: next gen Autopilot powered by more radar, new triple camera, some equipment already in production
18 Aug 2016: Tesla Autopilot 2.0: retrofit to next gen sensors likely to be available for some owners
The first Electrek article on 11 Aug 2016 talks about AP2.0 going into production. Most deliveries in that quarter had not happened yet because most deliveries happen in the last month of the quarter. Therefore in September, you would expect new buyers to question whether their car has AP2.0 when they arrive to take delivery or before that. The reality is, none of the cars delivered in September 2016 had Autopilot 2.0. I wonder how many of those buyers would have taken delivery if they knew the second Electrek article on 18 Aug 2016 was completely false and a retrofit was not possible.
It would be better for Tesla to control hardware changes with price reductions and increases instead of trying to keep information from leaking.
- "Last year, Pete Bannon, Tesla’s chip architect in charge of the project, said that they were ramping up their manufacturing effort and aiming to start production of the Autopilot Hardware 3 computer around the end of the first quarter of 2019."
- "Retrofits will start when our software is able to take meaningful advantage of the Tesla FSD computer, which is an order of magnitude more capable. For now, it’s slightly disadvantageous to have Tesla FSD computer, as our software is more refined for HW2."
I'm suspicious because of these two articles from 2016:
11 Aug 2016: Tesla Autopilot 2.0: next gen Autopilot powered by more radar, new triple camera, some equipment already in production
18 Aug 2016: Tesla Autopilot 2.0: retrofit to next gen sensors likely to be available for some owners
The first Electrek article on 11 Aug 2016 talks about AP2.0 going into production. Most deliveries in that quarter had not happened yet because most deliveries happen in the last month of the quarter. Therefore in September, you would expect new buyers to question whether their car has AP2.0 when they arrive to take delivery or before that. The reality is, none of the cars delivered in September 2016 had Autopilot 2.0. I wonder how many of those buyers would have taken delivery if they knew the second Electrek article on 18 Aug 2016 was completely false and a retrofit was not possible.
It would be better for Tesla to control hardware changes with price reductions and increases instead of trying to keep information from leaking.
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Fun thought: what if the changes to the autopilot pricing structure are because HW3’s current level of operation in the current feature set doesn’t do a great job with the features they moved into “FSD”, and it’s a way to buy time with people taking delivery of HW3 cars so they don’t screech about how people with HW2.5 have more features, at least until the HW3 branch passes HW2.5? The people paying for FSD and taking delivery with HW3 are obviously not a majority.
Knightshade
Well-Known Member
Dude- you were wholesale wrong on HW3 being 'different' from the factory or waiting being worthwhile.
Admit it and move on. you're grasping at straws now to find SOMETHING to have not been wrong about.
"different SW"? that was explicitly stated on the Q3 2018 call 6 months ago, with discussion of being able to run much larger NNs- that's not a "guessed 2 days ago" thing.
To you it now suggests that?
Numerous folks- myself included- said that's exactly how all this would work months ago on here in various EAP/FSD threads.
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I have been thinking about why Elon posted this tweet. There are two ways to read it. I'm now leaning towards option 2. I think that's what he meant.
Elon Musk on Twitter
- Option 1: Production won't switch to HW3 anytime soon. Therefore buyers don't need to worry about it. We will switch production to HW3 in the future when the performance is improved.
- Option 2: Soon when we announce that production has switched to HW3, tens of thousands of buyers who have FSD and HW2.X might contact Customer Service to ask about the retrofit. You don't need to do that because HW3 performance is not as good as HW2.X right now. Therefore waiting for the retrofit is better.
Elon Musk on Twitter
I have been thinking about why Elon posted this tweet. There are two ways to read it. I'm now leaning towards option 2. I think that's what he meant.
- Option 1: Production won't switch to HW3 anytime soon. Therefore buyers don't need to worry about it. We will switch production to HW3 in the future when the performance is improved.
- Option 2: Soon when we announce that production has switched to HW3, tens of thousands of buyers who have FSD and HW2.X might contact Customer Service to ask about the retrofit. You don't need to do that because HW3 performance is not as good as HW2.X right now. Therefore waiting for the retrofit is better.
Elon Musk on Twitter
I would guess is it option 2 as well, was thinking the same thing earlier this morning.
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