I have a late-2014 with AP1 and if my hopes/anticipations are correct, then in a week and a half I should get the following upgrades with the MCU2 upgrade for $1500.
Please correct me if I'm mistaken:
- Satisfy Recall (nice that I'm not having to do this just a have a bolt replaced whatever since it's a 90 min drive)
- New eMMC not only "resetting the clock", but with a theoretical 8x better lifespan
- 3G to LTE upgrade (very important as AT&T 3G is going away very soon just like their 2G is 100% gone)
- New, faster MCU that is the same version in the latest Teslas (reducing the differences between a 2014 and 2020 version)
- Instrument Console replacement (which is a big deal for me since mine is dripping and I was planning on buying a 3rd party replacement online - it'd be $1500 just to replace this alone from Tesla!)
Now, in terms of the $1,000 reduction and the HW3, that really is BS if you have FSD enabled and don't get the latest hardware. If you don't, my understanding (which could be out of date) is that it's not really applicable unless you have FSD. If they were upgrading non-FSD vehicles, then I'm really surprised that they were doing that and certainly if you paid an extra $1,000 for it, it's a good justification to feel better that maybe it increases the value of your car somewhat.
For AP1 owners like me, that logic wouldn't have made sense since we can't use HW3 and with the cost being the same, that's certainly not the true reason. The fact that they dropped the price right before the recall is what I believe the real reason to be. My understanding is that they never came up with a way to replace the eMMC by itself (which was really stupid of them, I'm sure the engineers knew failure was unavoidable), so anyone going in for just the Recall is going to be a real PITA for Tesla. It means they'd have to swap out and reprogram every older Tesla's MCU (and there are a whole ton of them) with a remanufactured one or potentially a brand new one. Recalls are serious things in this country and manufacturers go to great lengths and costs to make sure people get them done and I'm sure there are severe penalties for manufacturers who fail to meet requirements.
So, its really a no-brainer for Tesla to get $1,500 + my old MCU1 that they can use for future Recalls vs getting $0 and having a significant loss in labor and materials.