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IT Home reported on August 22 that Tesla has launched the FSD v12.5 update for vehicles equipped with older HW3 computers.

IT Home noted that in 2016, Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised that all Tesla models produced from then on would have the hardware required to achieve autonomous driving. He even made it clear that these vehicles would be able to support the highest level of "Level 5 autonomous driving", that is, autonomous driving at any time, place and conditions.

However, soon after, Musk admitted that Tesla might need a more powerful onboard computer to run the autopilot system. To this end, the company launched Hardware 3 (HW3). Musk claimed that HW3 would enable autonomous driving, and all early Tesla owners who purchased the FSD kit could upgrade to HW3 for free.

Tesla has since released a more powerful HW4 computer, but the company said it would not offer an upgrade option to HW4 for earlier models, insisting that HW3 would also enable autonomous driving through future software updates.

Last year, Musk even said that FSD would perform better on HW3 because Tesla "needs to focus on making FSD run really well on HW3 and available to the world." He also claimed that FSD performance on HW4 would lag behind HW3 by at least six months for this reason.

However, Tesla soon changed this strategy. FSD v12.5 was first deployed on new models equipped with HW4. Musk said that Tesla needed more time to optimize the code to adapt to HW3.

This suggests that Tesla is approaching the performance limits of HW3, and that FSD v12.5 is still a long way from the unsupervised autonomous driving capabilities that Tesla has been promising HW3 owners since 2016.

Tesla has now started pushing a new software update (2024.26.15) that brings FSD v12.5 to Tesla vehicles equipped with HW3. This update was released 23 days after Musk claimed that it would take 10 days to optimize for HW3.

Musk also claimed that versions 12.4 and 12.5 would no longer have a touch-the-wheel prompt and would be able to travel "five to ten times more miles before intervention." However, crowdsourced data showed that the mileage between each intervention increased by less than a factor of two.