Dan Detweiler
Active Member
So my question would then be, assuming they begin installation of hardware 3 in new cars by April, when will they begin retrofitting the cars of customers that bought FSD at point of purchase but have the old hardware 2?Just to recap, here's what Peter Bannon, Tesla's Director of Hardware Engineering said about the progress of HW3 on October 23 (~3 months ago):
Peter Bannon
Hi, this is Pete Bannon. The Hardware 3 design is continuing to move along. Over the last quarter, we've completed qualification of the silicon, qualification of the board. We started the manufacturing line, in qualification of the manufacturing line. We've been validating the provisioning flows in the factory. We built test versions of Model S, X and 3 in the factory to validate all the fit and finish of the parts and all the provisioning flows.
So we still have a lot of work to do. And the team is doing a great job, and we're still on track to have it ready to go by the end of Q1.
Elon Musk
Great. And that will be on it roughly 1000% increase in processing capability compared to the current hardware. And so, it's obviously giant improvement despite being a - it costs about the same. Cost, volume and power consumption are approximately the same as the current hardware, but it's a ten-fold improvement in frames per second.
Peter Bannon
That's right.
Elon Musk
Yeah, and improved redundancy as well. But very importantly - it's very important emphasize is that the only thing that needs to change between a car that's produced today and a car, let's say, produced in the two second quarter of next year is swapping out the Autopilot computer. And this is a simple change that takes less than half-an-hour in service to upgrade the computer. And so, anyone will be able to upgrade their computer to full self-driving capability or upgrade their car to full self-driving capability with a simple service visit.
So we expect all cars with a Hardware 2 sensor suite, basically anything made in the last roughly two years will be upgradeable to full self-driving.
Peter Bannon
Yeah. In fact, a lot of the cars we're using for testing today have in fact been upgraded from Hardware 2.
Elon Musk
Right, so it's very important to emphasize, like people shouldn't - but 5% people who would want to wait until that comes out. But there is no need to wait till it comes out, because it's just a very simple plug-and-play change to get to the full self-driving. And anyone who is compatible with self-driving option will just get it done for free. And anyone who still wants to order full self-driving at this point, it's just an off menu item, you can still order it.
But the - we took it off the order menu, just because there are - it was really creating a lot of friction in the sales process and people didn't understand the difference between Enhanced Autopilot and full self-driving. So just to simply the order process, we took that off. But anyone who asks for it can certainly get it. And it really ends up being a discount of future capability.
But to be clear, there is definitely no need to wait until Q2 to order a car. It's - we want to make it just completely seamless process, so there is no advantage ordering now versus Q2. Andre, do you want to…?
Andrej Karpathy
Yeah, certainly. Hi, everyone. My name is Andrej Karpathy. I'm the director of AI here at Tesla. And my team trains all of the neural networks that analyze the images streaming in from all the cameras for the Autopilot. For example, these neural networks identify cars, lane lines, traffic signs and so on. The team is incredibly excited about the upcoming upgrade for the Autopilot computer which Pete briefly talked about.
This upgrade allows us to not just run the current neural networks faster, but more importantly, it will allow us to deploy much larger, computationally more expensive networks to the fleet. The reason this is important is that, it is a common finding in the industry and that we see this as well, is that as you make the networks bigger by adding more neurons, the accuracy of all their predictions increases with the added capacity.
So in other words, we are currently at a place where we trained large neural networks that work very well, but we are not able to deploy them to the fleet due to computational constraints. So, all of this will change with the next iteration of the hardware. And it's a massive step improvement in the compute capability. And the team is incredibly excited to get these networks out there.
Elon Musk
Great, thank you. Again - actually I've said this before, what I think - just talking a bit about the kind of long-term future, we absolutely see the future as kind of - as sort of a shared electric autonomy. So that you'll be able to do ride-hailing or share your car anyway, sort of long-term model that's some combination of like Uber, Lyft and Airbnb. There will be Tesla dedicated cars for ride-hailing and there will be - and any customer will be able to share their car at will, just like you share your house in Airbnb. So it's a combination of those two models. I think, it's pretty obviously where things are headed long-term.
The advantage that Tesla will have is that we will have millions of cars in the field with full autonomy capability, and no one else will have that. So I think that puts us - that will end up putting us in the strongest competitive position long-term.
So the timeline is to have it ready to go by the end of Q1, i.e. start installing HW3 in all new cars manufactured in early April.
If Elon does his big product announcements at around March 15 then maybe an announcement about HW3 could be part of that presentation too.
Dan
