For almost nine years, Elon Musk has promised that Tesla vehicles had the hardware needed to support an autonomous driving car. This week, he made his last admission that many are not.
Musk said in a teleconference on Wednesday evening that Tesla cars equipped with so -called hardware 3 will need an update before they can support autonomous driving software without supervision that the car manufacturer is still developing. These hardware vehicles 3, sold between 2019 and 2023, are equipped with the previous version of the computer that feeds the driving assistance software “with autonomous (supervised)” of the company.
“I think the honest answer whether we will have to update the hardware computer 3 for those who have purchased autonomous driving,” he said. “It will be painful and difficult, but we will do it.”
This is not surprising for anyone who has followed the progress of the company up close.
In general, Musk repeatedly exaggerated Tesla’s time sequence for the sale of a vehicle capable of driving independently without human intervention. But the company has now repeatedly specifications on its 2016 affirmation according to which every car he was building had the hardware necessary to completely drive himself with the launch of a switch – a dissatisfied promise that has been central for Tesla’s evaluation for years . (Since then Tesla has eliminated that blog post from its website.)
Tesla presented this request in October 2016, several months after it separated from Mobileye, who provided the original computer for its assistance software to the automatic pilot driver. Tesla nicknamed her initial hardware hardware to which she referred to the announcement of 2016- “Hardware 2.0”. A year later he started integrating a “hardware 2.5” computer.
None of these computers was up to the task, however, highlighted by the fact that when Tesla started sending cars with a “hardware 3” computer in 2019, the owners with older hardware had to update to this new computer To buy complete supervision of autonomous driving software. Initially Tesla charged this update, but an owner brought the company to a small request court and obtained a judge to establish that the promise of Tesla 2016 was “false advertising” and that updates should be free.
Since then Tesla has moved on to the construction of cars with “Hardware 4” computers, who had some owners who wondered what it meant for 3 -equipped cars equipped with hardware. Musk and other managers of Tesla had claimed to believe they could develop software that would allow hardware 3 cars to drive themselves without supervision and one even repeated this statement on Wednesday. But Musk followed saying he had given up.
His admission Wednesday only underlines that Tesla and Musk were wrong when they made that notorious proclamation in 2016.
At the time Musk was also unequivocal and provocative, reaching the point of saying that the media “kill people” by writing “negative” articles on accidents involving the assistance system for Tesla drivers, the automatic pilot. “You actually dissuaded people from the use of an autonomous vehicle,” he said in a teleconference in 2016, a time when there were no completely autonomous vehicles.
This is not the case today, since Waymo manages a commercial robotaxi service in several cities.
Musk said on Wednesday that Tesla intends to demonstrate that he can do the same with a pilot program that he hopes to launch to Austin next June. He therefore wants to send a cars software update with newer “hardware 4” computers that will allow them to drive themselves. For these reasons, he said that 2025 will be “perhaps the most important year in the story of Tesla”.
