Elon Musk has killed the little hope some had for Tesla in offering a retrofit to the brand new Autopilot/Self-Driving hardware (HW4) to current Tesla owners.
Tesla is predicted to announce a latest Autopilot/Self-Driving hardware suite, which has been known as Hardware 4.0 (HW4), any day now.
There have been quite just a few indications that some major changes are coming. For instance, after famously removing radar sensors from its hardware suite, we learned in December that Tesla is planning so as to add one as soon as this month.
Moreover, we also reported on a Tesla Model 3 prototype that potentially featured a latest Autopilot/Full Self-Driving hardware suite.
Finally, a report coming out of China showed that Tesla applied with regulators for some modifications to its vehicles, including latest Autopilot cameras.
Now during Tesla’s conference call for the discharge of its Q4 2022 financial results, CEO Elon Musk was asked concerning the potential of Tesla offering retrofits to the brand new hardware for current Tesla owners, however the CEO shut down the thought:
The fee and difficulty of retrofitting Hardware 3 with Hardware 4 is kind of significant. So it will not be, I feel, economically feasible to accomplish that.
Nonetheless, he did make clear that he still expects Tesla’s full self-driving guarantees to be achieved with the present Hardware 3, which should ease some concerns that many homeowners had.
Musk said through the call:
Hardware 3 is not going to be pretty much as good as Hardware 4, but I’m confident that Hardware 3 will thus far exceed the security of the common human. So how can we get ultimately to – let’s say, for argument’s sake, if Hardware 3 will be, say, 200% or 300% safer than humans, Hardware 4 is perhaps 500% or 600%. It would be Hardware 5 beyond that. But what really matters is are we improving the common safety on the road.
Nonetheless, the CEO didn’t discuss Tesla achieving true full self-driving capability that can enable a robotaxi service approved by regulators, which ultimately is what the corporate has been promising to each Tesla owner since 2016.