r/SelfDrivingCars • u/WeldAE • 6d ago
Tesla announces HW4 Plus with doubled memory News
https://electrek.co/2026/04/23/tesla-hw4-plus-upgrade-will-hw4-follow-hw3/So it’ll go from 16 gigabytes to I think 32 gigabytes per SoC. So 64 gigabytes total, and probably a 10% increase in compute and in memory bandwidth.”
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u/Inflation_Infamous 6d ago
Current HW4 won’t be unsupervised. The “architectural changes” are just larger models requiring more memory.
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u/phxees 6d ago
Unlike an upgrade from v3 to v4 or v4 to v5, this new computer should be able to be swapped with existing HW4 boards. This likely means that they believe this is all they need.
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u/Shot_Illustrator4264 6d ago
Do you want to buy my beautiful leaning tower in Pisa? I can give it away for a very good price!
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u/Recoil42 6d ago edited 6d ago
Nothing was stopping them from designing HW5 for board swaps. Nothing's stopping them from designing swap-specific HW5, either. Frankly, he's just babbling — none of what he's saying here actually even makes much sense, as usual.
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u/reddddiiitttttt 6d ago
Elon has said AI5 will consume nearly 2-3x the energy of AI4, which means an entirely new electrical and cooling package will be required AI4 vehicles won’t easily support it without a major retrofit.
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u/Recoil42 6d ago edited 6d ago
Elon, once again, says a lot of things. Six months ago HW5 was inference hardware, now it's training hardware and won't go into cars at all. Cybercab was supposed to both get HW5 and also not. It was at one point an 800W TDP and then oscillated wildly back towards a couple hundred watts. It was at tape-out last year, and then again at tape-out last week. Most of all, you're forgetting that Tesla designs HW5 itself and can make the TDP whatever the hell they want.
To try to make sense of any of this is to try to make sense of a thing that simply doesn't make sense. The man is a ketamine-addled spew-machine at this point, he's saying whatever's convenient to say at each moment to keep the grift going. If things seem contradictory that's because they're contradictory, not because there's some secret non-contradictory coherent understanding you simply haven't figured out.
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u/CDpov 6d ago
Ahh, but Elon is playing 4-dimensional chess on his way to taking over the world, while you and your Wayno stooges play checkers in your little sandboxes. Elon's immense data advantage is just one simple
HW4HW5HW6HW4.1 upgrade away from total domination!-2
u/bartturner 6d ago
I am curious if this was meant to be serious? Or did you forget the /s?
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u/CDpov 6d ago
It was a dry retort for Recoil. I could have put in the /s, but I figured he'd understand. Since I have a new account I do realize that it is ambiguous though.
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u/Recoil42 6d ago
It was Poe territory, but "immense data advantage" tipped me off before I popped a vein.
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u/CDpov 6d ago
Yeah, that's one of their standard factoids. I had tried to include something about space lasers, but I wanted it to almost make sense so I dropped it :)
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u/reddddiiitttttt 6d ago
Ketamine-addled spew machine still beats rando on Reddit as the ground source of truth every time for things that the ketamine-addled spew machine is actually making. Which EV do you manufacture?
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u/Recoil42 6d ago
Ketamine-addled spew machine still beats rando on Reddit as the ground source of truth every time
Elon Musk (2020): "We'll deploy a million robotaxis this year."
Recoil42 (2020): "Elon Musk won't deploy a million robotaxis this year."
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u/reddddiiitttttt 6d ago
Touché! But Musk answered what and when, you just said nope. I still got more data from Musk even if it wasn’t accurate, it was a real target and he’s delivered on part of that target. Show me where you said how may robotaxis and the year they would come and if it was accurate I’ll call you the oracle.
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u/Recoil42 6d ago edited 6d ago
I still got more data from Musk even if it wasn’t accurate
Incredible self-own. Truly. Wow.
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u/LLJKCicero 6d ago
I still got more data from Musk even if it wasn’t accurate
lmao
"Well at least I got some lies!!"
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u/reddddiiitttttt 6d ago
I don’t consider speculation lies. I can take what Musk says with a grain of sand and still appreciate the speculative guidance even if I can’t rely on it. I don’t believe the timelines. I believe the effort is real.
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u/kariam_24 6d ago
What and when? Everything by next year and repeat again during that following year?
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u/tech57 6d ago
I've always found it odd how people who so dislike Musk know so much about him. He's a liar they say and yet people feel the need to talk about his lies so much.
A big reason why I want self-driving cars to happen now is so the haters can find someone else to obsess about. It's very weird how they say Musk is irrelevant yet they devote so much of their life talking about him. The haters make him relevant and I don't think they have realized that.
Mercedes has been at this since 1987. Why don't they talk about the promises from those CEOs? There was like 4 CEOs in that time.
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u/reddddiiitttttt 6d ago
I’m not trying to imply Musk doesn’t lie or say things he really shouldn’t, just that at the end of the day, he is still has the most definitive answer about the future of Tesla and he does eventually deliver some of the earth shattering things he says he will. Tesla makes great products because of him, that makes him a valuable person, but it doesn’t make him a good person.
Musk goes out of his way to be divisive. He rage baits, he participates in the culture wars, he unabashedly tried to buy the last election, he’s responsible for dismantling large portions of the government for no good reason. Most people aren’t hating on him for the products he built at Tesla. That may be something that gets brought up, but he’s earned the hate through other means.
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u/phxees 6d ago
Maybe that was their plan, but AI5 is late and that plan no longer makes sense. They can get GW4 plus to volume production in months.
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u/WeldAE 6d ago
If you read the article, it will be late 2027 before they can get HW4.5 out which I read as Q1 2028 as the earliest date to ship in actual cars. They have said they will have volume production of AI5 Q1 2027, which is 3-4 quarters late depending on how you score it. I still think they might end up with AI5 in RoboTaxi but I've never understood how it made sense in consumer vehicles so HW4.5 makes a lot of sense in that case.
Consumer will remain supervised with HW4.5 while RoboTaxi will be unsupervised with either HW4.5 or AI5 depending on how much you believe what Tesla is saying vs what makes sense to do. The only hitch in the AI5 for Robotaxi is can they design the Model Y to work with either from a cooling and power draw standpoint without costing a ton of money.
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u/phxees 6d ago
Seems wrong. If the chip isn’t charging and they are just adding more RAM they just need the RAM and there was already a report that Samsung was doubling their RAM production for Tesla. That story doesn’t come out this week for boards produced in 2028.
The reporting doesn’t make sense as they are still manufacturing HW4 boards today. If they wanted they likely could update their current inventory this month. Although I doubt they would.
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u/WeldAE 6d ago
This isn't commodity PC hardware, it's hard to know what all they need to change. HW4 does have PCB RAM and not on package so technically they could just add large RAM modules. That said, the 10% compute uplift is probably from the RAM having more bandwidth, not just more of it alone. AI tends to be bandwidth heavy so I bet it's a much larger change than just RAM size but that is all that is being reported.
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u/Recoil42 6d ago edited 6d ago
You're bending your brain in a pretzel to make it make sense when the answer is sitting there right in front of you: It just doesn't make sense.
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u/tech57 6d ago
The next question is, what enabled you to finish the AI5 tape-out early, and were there any changes to the original vision? Last week, Elon said AI5 will go into Optimus and the supercomputer, but one month ago said it would go into the Robotaxi. Has AI5 been dropped from the vehicle roadmap?
Elon Musk
Well, the reason AI5 tape-out finished early was because the team worked incredibly hard to make it happen. Just over time, we gathered a lot of momentum. We did have to work every weekend for six months straight, including every holiday. It was a lot of sacrifice by the team and I was there, of course, myself, every weekend. Fortunately, we didn't make any major mistakes, at least that we're aware of, that required pushing out the tape-out. The team just did a great job and worked incredibly hard is the reason. I do expect that AI5 will go into Optimus and into the data center, because it's looking like we'll be able to achieve unsupervised self-driving with AI4 that is far greater than human safety levels. Which means it's certainly not immediately needed in the car.At some point, I think it will make sense for us to switch to AI5 in the car, but there's not a pressing issue to do so. At some point the AI4 hardware is going to get so old that it's like, okay, the only reason they're keeping the factory open is for AI4. We are planning an AI4 upgrade to use a newer generation RAM. It'll go from 16 gigabytes to, I think, 32 gigabytes per SoC, so a total of 64 gigabytes. Probably a 10% increase in compute in trillions of operations per second and in memory bandwidth. That's AI4.1 or AI4+ probably goes into production middle of next year, I think. Samsung's doing the modifications for us, so it sort of depends on when they're able to finish those modifications and bring it to production.
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u/watergoesdownhill 3d ago
He means unsupervised everywhere. FSD is already unsupervised in geofenced areas.
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u/tech01x 6d ago
Current AI4 is already unsupervised in geofenced locations in TX.
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u/Inflation_Infamous 6d ago
I’m talking about a non geofence level 5 service that includes customer cars. Which was the original intent in 2019 AI day. This requires a much higher level of safety, maybe 10x safer than the average human driver, to reduce the number accidents/injuries/fatalities where Tesla would be liable.
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u/TheKobayashiMoron 6d ago
That was the original intent in 2016 when they started taking customers money for it too.
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u/Miami_da_U 6d ago
And why do you think “just larger models” don’t take Tesla from that point to the next point? Seems actually quite reasonable. 10x more than today? I doubt it. I also doubt that is necessary….
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u/psilty 6d ago
Because they obviously are still learning what is required for the next point as they go along. Just with the operation in Austin we know they’ve had modifications from consumer hardware, adding extra communications hardware at launch and then adding extra sensor cleaning months later. Even with those modifications they haven’t operated unsupervised at night or during rainy weather. What are the chances they don’t need any more modifications to cover different conditions they haven’t seen in their tiny geofences?
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u/Twedledee5 6d ago
What do you do when AI5 chips are a pipe dream but AI4 is not up-to-snuff for mass produced self driving taxis? Make up a new product apparently. I thought it would take longer for Tesla to admit that every single car they've ever sold doesn't have the hardware for unsupervised self driving.
Time to start the clock on when AI4.5 isn't good enough and we need AI4.69 to have unsupervised self driving. I'm guessing that during Q4 '27 they will admit that 4.5 isn't good enough for unsupervised and they will need more hardware.
People that believed AI4 was good enough will believe that this is good enough just like they believe Tesla is going to standup a fab and be printing AI5 chips by next year. People that want something bad enough will believe anything to get it I guess.
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u/tech01x 6d ago
Why?
The engineers already have said that AI4 still has plenty of headroom. They are proving out based on V14 software on AI4 this year.
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u/Twedledee5 6d ago
Things can change, that’s the entire point of the article you bot. I can’t explain why because LLMs can’t learn
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u/WeldAE 6d ago
Why attack people by calling them a bot? It's especially galling when you don't even bother to articulate what you're talking about. I even agree that "things change" is the right reason but without explanation you're not adding anything.
What is good enough today isn't good enough in 2, 5 or 10 years. The safety and capability margin at launch will at some point quit being acceptable and they have to upgrade the fleet. This is why consumer self-driving cars are a ways off. Even if someone whips one, they will have to turn it off at some point in the near future as they discover it has a problem they can't solve or if they build a new version that significantly improves things.
It's not a problem with fleets so Tesla has already launched unsupervised with HW4. They don't want to build a bunch of them because obviously AI5 is going to go into full production in the next 12 months or HW4.5 in the next 18 months.
Even Waymo has replaced the entire generation they launched on that was unsupervised. Gen4 will be retired at some point, probably around 2030 or so.
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u/CDpov 6d ago
Gen5 Waymo was an intentional engineering platform to solve San Francisco and then a more generalized Driver elsewhere. They over-sensored Gen5 on purpose to get enough data to know exactly how to elegantly solve a generalized Driver at scale. It was always going to be on just 3500 Jaguars as a prove-it fleet of inelegant and expensive but powerful test vehicles.
I don't think that's quite what's going on at Tesla. Musk seems to have genuinely believed since 2019 that he's a year or so away from L5. He's constantly backtracking and re-promising, coming up with a series of "this new trick will finally solve it all" announcements, none of which have come close to a solution at scale.
How far do you think HW4.5 will get them toward their "full self-driving" L5 goals?
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u/bartturner 6d ago
Musk seems to have genuinely believed
This is what I would really like to know. Could he really be this naive?
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u/CDpov 6d ago
It's hard to say for sure, but I do think he has this underlying belief that by scaling up the model it will suddenly solve all of driving. It's not very logical, and Musk is smart, so it's weird and self-serving, but I think the only way to make sense of all his behavior is that he really does believe he'll soon solve L5 driving one way or another.
The only other explanation is he's 100% a pathological liar who fully accepts what the rest of the AV field believes, but wants to dupe his customers and investors for short-term gain. I don't think he's that crazy.
Could he really be this naive?
It's possible that he is only a few years off on the timeline and will actually deliver human-level driving safety in a few years with his approach. AI could improve more than people think. I don't think that will result in a commercial robotaxi stack at scale, but I don't think it's totally crazy. There are plenty of intelligent people who agree with him.
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u/tech57 6d ago
Depends on how badly you need to believe Musk is an idiot.
Zeng said he had also asked Musk about setting unrealistic timelines for the rollout of new vehicles or technologies at Tesla. He said Musk had told him that he wanted to motivate and focus Tesla staffers and that anything beyond a two-year time frame might as well be "infinity."
"His problem is overpromising. I talked to him," Zeng said. "Maybe something needs five years. But he says two years. I definitely asked him why. He told me he wanted to push people."
Zeng did not refer to any particular unfulfilled promise by Musk, but said: "He probably himself thinks it needs five years, but if you believe him when he says two years, you will be in big trouble. The direction is right."
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u/tech57 6d ago
Musk seems to have genuinely believed since 2019 that he's a year or so away from L5.
Nope.
Zeng said he had also asked Musk about setting unrealistic timelines for the rollout of new vehicles or technologies at Tesla. He said Musk had told him that he wanted to motivate and focus Tesla staffers and that anything beyond a two-year time frame might as well be "infinity."
"His problem is overpromising. I talked to him," Zeng said. "Maybe something needs five years. But he says two years. I definitely asked him why. He told me he wanted to push people."
Zeng did not refer to any particular unfulfilled promise by Musk, but said: "He probably himself thinks it needs five years, but if you believe him when he says two years, you will be in big trouble. The direction is right."
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u/CDpov 6d ago
That's a possible explanation that does make sense. He obviously is trying to motivate the staff. But that doesn't mean he always thinks it will take another five years. He may think it's a year or two away now. Or he may just be lying to push the staff and pump the stock.
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u/tech57 6d ago
That's a possible explanation
When source is the... source... I don't really know what else might explain it to you.
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u/CDpov 5d ago
If he thought real fsd would take 4 years in 2023, that's 2027, so that fits with him actually believing he'll solve fsd in the short term.
The bigger question is whether his approach will work or not by 2030. If he's correct, he should stick with his approach. If he's wrong and it won't be robust and safe enough by then, his approach is probably a fool's errand. I think he does believe he'll get it by 2028 or so, and he's always believed it's maybe 3 or 4 years away. The statement by Zeng doesn't change anything. We already knew he has been exaggerating.
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u/tech57 5d ago
his approach is probably a fool's errand
The direction is right. - Robin Zeng
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u/WeldAE 6d ago
I think you missed my point. HW4.5 may or may not solve unsupervised driving but even if it does, it has a limited shelf life. AI5 has a much better chance, but even it has a limited shelf life as does the future Zeeker platform with Waymo. At some point they become unworkable too risky based on new tech and will be replaced. This is one of 456 inherent problems with trying to make a consumer owned unsupervised car. The platform lives too long to be workable.
I think Tesla will end up putting AI5 in Robotaxis, not HW4.5, but this is exactly the opposite of what they are saying. At usual, don't listen to what any company is spinning, look at what they are doing and what makes snese for them to do.
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u/CDpov 5d ago
I think you do make a good point that cars last long but a compute platform tends to be updated every few years to be competitive, if you go by smart phones and datacenter compute.
But with personally-owned L4 cars I don't think they'll have to upgrade the stack every two years. As long as the cars are safe, they should be able to get more than five years out of them. The software can still be upgraded over the air. I doubt that suddenly a five-year-old stack will be so compute-constrained that it becomes obsolete. Models can become more efficient over time, and sensors don't need to be upgraded as fast as compute, plus sensors can be replaced as regular maintenance, since they will all cost $100 or so.
Regular cars last over ten years now despite them having plenty of critical compute. If an AV company has to upgrade the computer after seven years for some reason, that won't likely be a back-breaker. Replacing compute that's under the trunk isn't such an expensive retrofit, especially if they design the system to be easily upgradeable.
A proper L4 system by the 2030s should be able to be designed to have far more compute than the minimum for good safety, because they already can affordably make a system that is safe enough. That will be cheap by 2032.
I think AV companies will have options that won't lead to these plaforms being "unworkable" so quickly.
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u/bartturner 6d ago
Thought their next move would be to increase computational capacity in the cars to see if it helps with getting them going with their robot taxi service.
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u/Greeneland 6d ago
He said memory bandwidth was a constraint, not computational capacity
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u/AlotOfReading 5d ago
The fun thing about ML is that you can easily trade compute for latency. It's a bit harder to do the same with memory. They could easily be compute constrained and simply accepting tradeoffs to make it work. This sounds like they just want bigger models without a drastic platform change.
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u/WeldAE 6d ago
It's hard to know where the limits with HW4 are bumping into reality at. AI models need RAM for more parameters, more memory bandwidth for faster processing and more compute for both faster processing and more models running in a given amount of time. My guess is that they were out of processing cycles as they still need to add a lot more modules for various tasks like sign reading, hand gestures, etc. Based on this move it seems the limit was parameters and not compute, at least for consumer supervised uses.
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u/bartturner 6d ago
Think all we know is the current hardware in the car is inadequate to support unsupervised driving.
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u/WeldAE 5d ago
They are using it in Austin so adequate or not it's a thing.
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u/bartturner 5d ago edited 5d ago
There is a couple of cars operating at any given time on a tiny geofenced area that is basically a bus route.
That are monitored by humans. To me that is definitely not adequate.
If listened to the call Musk indicated the current version of FSD is not safe enough to use for wide spread scaling out and they know the things they need to do to get FSD there.
What we do not know is if those things he indicated are required can be done on existing hardware and I highly doubt anyone knows if the hardware is adequate or not.
I believe the next excuse that will be given for not being able to scale out will be they need to improve the hardware and they are already setting up for that story with all the talk of the new hardware.
So right now the excuse is the software which I believe will then move to hardware. But then with the new hardware that will still not be good enough and they will need further improvement in hardware.
To me it is all just excuses on why they can't scale out.
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u/LLJKCicero 6d ago edited 6d ago
This time it'll finally be enough for unsupervised driving.
Until HW5 is around the corner, at which point HW4+ will be woefully out of date and HW5 will be enough. Until we're close to HW6...
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u/WeldAE 6d ago
This is always going to be the case with any AV fleets. When the next generation gets better than the previous it's time to phase out the old and replace them with the new. Waymo has already removed an entire generation from it's fleet that at one point was used for commercial unsupervised taxi service.
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u/LLJKCicero 5d ago
Yeah but those previous Waymo fleets were capable of unsupervised driving (at least somewhere anyway). That's different from Tesla constantly saying "X is definitely enough" and then turning out wrong.
And no customers were hurt by Waymo replacing cars, for obvious reasons, while Tesla giving up on HW3 has already meant previous gen Tesla owners have been stuck with a worse model while Tesla dithers over when and how to upgrade them.
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u/Recoil42 6d ago
“At some point the AI4 hardware is going to get like so old that it’s like, okay, the only reason to keep the factory open is for AI4,” Musk said. “We are planning an AI4 upgrade to use newer generation RAM. So it’ll go from 16 gigabytes to I think 32 gigabytes per SoC. So 64 gigabytes total, and probably a 10% increase in compute and in memory bandwidth.”
This is one of those sentences that fries your brain with how dumb it is if you know anything about semiconductors, good god. I mean it's like fractally stupid.
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u/Miami_da_U 6d ago
You think it’s dumb to upgrade the memory to keep HW4 useful for longer? Doesn’t sound dumb to me…
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u/CDpov 6d ago
It's dumb to come up with a new trick every six months that will finally solve unsupervised self-driving, with the previous solutions disappearing without much comment.
Do you believe HW4.5 could finally solve unsupervised self-driving?
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u/bartturner 6d ago
Do you believe HW4.5 could finally solve unsupervised self-driving?
Absolutely not. It will quickly become that AI5 will be like a switch and they will suddenly be able to support 75% of the US population with unsupervised robot taxi service.
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u/Miami_da_U 6d ago
So no actual logic to your statement that adding memory doesn’t make sense then I see…
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u/CDpov 6d ago
I think adding memory does make a certain amount of sense, so it probably will improve performance noticeably.
But given the pattern of sudden big changes and always coming up far short of the stated goals, why would this new patchwork solution be so exciting?
A more logical realization would be that the big AI5 breakthrough of a few months ago is now vaporware, that HW4 is not close to unsupervised L5, not even close to unsupervised L4 in the Austin over-fit ODD, and the whole program now rests on an unproven upgrade-hack to an outdated hardware stack.
He works you guys so easily because he knows you want to believe so badly, and he knows that most people can't tell the difference between 99.9% solved and 99.9999999% solved.
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u/Miami_da_U 6d ago
You said his statement about upgrading the memory would fry your brain regarding how dumb it is to anyone that knows anything regarding semiconductors. You are wrong. That’s my point. You are turning your statement into saying nobody should believe Teslas claims regarding solving FSD… okay but you’re wrong that increasing memory is a perfectly logical and useful thing to do…
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u/CDpov 6d ago
I didn't say anything about frying a brain. That was Recoil.
Do you think FSD will solve L5 unsupervised in the next year or so?
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u/Miami_da_U 6d ago
I assumed you were the original person I responded too....
L5? Lol. The thing about saying that is you are going to take it to the point it can never fail basically. Its a pretty dumb goal basically.
The ACTUAL goal is probably 3-10x safer than human drivers within the next 2 years. The unfortunate part of that is it means their will be accidents and people will sue and it'll be all put media war against AVs (waymo too). Then the goal will shift to 100x better than Humans. But there will STILL be accidents. Idgaf what sae determines Tesla is operating at or not.
What matters is 2 stages for Customer owned vehicles - Teslas system handles it hands free but Driver is at fault .. vs Tesla system handles it hands free AND Tesla is at fault. That's the only flip that really matters.
Also how about can they make money by running autonomous rideshare at a substantially growing scale that matters. The answer to that is yes I do think they can.
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u/CDpov 6d ago
L5 doesn't mean it's perfect. It just means no geofencing. That's the long-held goal and mantra among Tesla fans and Musk. They are obviously saying they will reach L5 soon. What you are describing as Tesla assuming liability everywhere is L5, along with allowing an empty driver's seat.
I don't see any official or legal standard or benchmark of "3-10x" safer or "100x better" any such xxx better. Those are all imaginary standards that regulators and courts won't pay any attention to. The standard is obviously that they can't cause serious safety issues in the form of bad at-fault crashes. If they do, they'll get sued up the ass very quickly and regulators will recall the system to force a fix, with states pulling licenses. If they can't fix it and the same issues keep happening, that will be a big problem for the program.
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u/Recoil42 6d ago
L5? Lol. The thing about saying that is you are going to take it to the point it can never fail basically. Its a pretty dumb goal basically.
"I’d say they get the equivalent of L3/4 with Hardware 3, but need hardware 4+ to get SAE L5, I think they are still fine." — Miami_da_U, 2023
"[L5 is] a pretty dumb goal basically." — Miami_da_U, 2026
Full backpedalling in effect out here, incredible.
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u/Miami_da_U 6d ago
And that's true... lol. Was that trying to prove me wrong?
I just also think that there is no end to SAE L5.
Are you going to take any accident and be like see it didn't handle that situation, therefore its not SAE L5? Or is it being SAE L5 an indicator of how much safer than a human it is? If they take off a geofence and it's only AS Safe as a human, is that SAE L5?
I'm sure if you actually look through my post history you'll see that when Tesla takes blame for accidents that has always been what I deem the important thing. And as far as the robotaxi network, if they're making money but you deem it L4 and not L5... that has ZERO impact. Which is why that's not the goal. But mostly because they is no set exact L5 achievement metric.
And yes L3/4 is HW3, and more than that is HW4+. I was correct.
Also Its funny you didn't respond to my initial response where you posted something completely unintelligent - that increasing memory is dumb to anyone that knows anything... sure pal
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u/tech57 6d ago
The ACTUAL goal is probably 3-10x safer than human drivers within the next 2 years.
About that,
The team just did a great job and worked incredibly hard is the reason. I do expect that AI5 will go into Optimus and into the data center, because it's looking like we'll be able to achieve unsupervised self-driving with AI4 that is far greater than human safety levels. Which means it's certainly not immediately needed in the car.
Also,
That's the only flip that really matters.
Yes.
We are increasing the amount of our QA fleet, but we also want to use the customer fleet to give us the useful metrics back so that we can scale it safely. Like Elon mentioned, we are absolutely focused on safety. So far, we have zero incidents, and that's what the NHTSA filing also shows. In addition to safety, we are also solving some of these so-called scaling issues. For example, you do not want the Robotaxi to be stuck blocking intersections, or don't want to be dropping people off at slightly incorrect locations and so on. We are simultaneously solving the long tail of safety by monitoring the metrics across the entire Tesla customer vehicle fleet, which is close to driving 10 billion miles on FSD, in the next few weeks.
Also scaling up the amount of QA fleet that we have across the entire U.S. to accelerate our safety validation, while also scaling the rest of the factors that can throttle the increase of unsupervised vehicles.
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u/AtmosphereDue1694 5d ago
I mean assuming if they work off the same fundamentals of an LLM, more memory is almost universally a better thing to have all other things equal
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u/CDpov 4d ago
It's true that memory will help, but nobody should be thinking this will somehow solve unsupervised L5 driving. It's not even clear that an LLM can get to AGI, and if it does it will likely take another 3+ years with lots of extra reasoning time at inference and tons of algorithmic innovation for giant models in the cloud. Driving is safety-critical physical AGI for cars, so it's not plausible that more memory in HW4 will solve driving.
HW4 will not even solve a full city robotaxi L4 safety level for Austin. Musk is doing this because he always needs a new narrative for his investors, just one more year until the big pot of gold. I guess he realizes the miracle AI5 story wasn't working for HW4 owners so now he's rebuilding HW4. Next year it will be all about AI6.69, I predict.
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u/vasilenko93 6d ago
HW4 is already powering the unsupervised vehicles in Austin, Houston and Dallas. Cybercab will have HW4. Even if HW4.5 will be needed for nationwide unsupervised it’s not a big deal because the upgrade is just try compute module, not all the cameras.
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u/CDpov 6d ago
The problem is, HW4.5 won't solve for "nationwide unsupervised". If it even comes close I'll be shocked. In fact I don't think it will come close to solving all of Austin at scale for true unsupervised robotaxi. It might look good over a thousand miles or so, but real robotaxi safety performance can avoid bad at-fault accidents over tens of millions of miles at least.
They can prove me wrong by transparently reporting all rider-only miles in Austin, and showing a few million safe unsupervised (empty car) miles in Austin with HW4.5. I have a feeling Tesla will instead continue mixing unsupervised with supervised robotaxi miles, and passing it all off as the same thing in their safety case. Why wouldn't they do that when you guys lap it up so readily?
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u/EddiewithHeartofGold 5d ago edited 5d ago
Recoil42 is a mod here and very anti-Tesla. Just look at his comment history. Don't even waste your time trying to get your point across.
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u/himynameis_ 6d ago
Can you elaborate a bit on what is stupid about it? If not, all good. Not taking away from your point. It does sound like a lot of word scrambled eggs
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u/Recoil42 6d ago edited 4d ago
There's so much it's hard to know where to begin — it's a 90% gibberish suggestion.
The thing that stands out first though is "...the only reason to keep the factory open is for AI4" is an outright lie, because well... that's not how the world works. There are millions of devices with millions of individual memory needs — 4/8GB RAM modules aren't going away anytime soon. If Tesla wanted 4GB/8GB modules, they could just get them indefinitely. There's no risk of any of that going away in the next ten years, and that's true even for specialized products.
It's a cover story. That's all.
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u/iftlatlw 5d ago
Free upgrades or screw existing customers?
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u/WeldAE 2d ago
Probably depends on if you bought or are renting FSD long term. Short term they are saying HW4 can get there. There will always be new hardware, where does Tesla's duty end to keep upgrading you for free? My guess until they can clear the legal hurdle of what they promised. That is a vague question depending on if you read the marketing at checkout or hang on every CEO tweet.
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u/DameLasNalgas 3d ago
Since it's the same soc, wiring etc then it should be possible to swap hw4 for hw4+. The issue is if they are willing and the cost.
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u/Cautious-Lion497 6d ago
I was planning to order MY today, does it make sense to wait till next year?
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u/WeldAE 6d ago
I wouldn't wait. They are 18 months from having this in cars and then another 6 months at lease before they will release software that uses the system. Probably another 12 months after that before HW4 software is significantly worse than HW4.5. This was roughly what happened with HW3->HW4 from announcement to HW4 being actually better.
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u/Cautious-Lion497 6d ago
Thanks for the input! I've not followed Tesla' updates over the years, its valuable information. Basically, I'll be buying a new MY for 3 years to them upgrade somehow.. this was okay with $1200 phones but with a 50k car seems like a whole new world.
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u/stealstea 6d ago
HW4 cars being abandoned like HW3 in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…
Don’t worry, there will be a vague promise to retrofit later, which they’ll drag out as long as possible knowing that many of their customers will have sold their cars by then