Is Your Tesla Eligible For HW 2.5 Update For Full Autopilot?

Tesla issued its last hardware upgrade — HW 2.0 in October, 2016, which will equip all its cars with deep neural net computer vision technology. However, the company did not implement the update and in less than a year, it has already started equipping all its vehicles in the production stage, including the Model 3, with the new HW 2.5 hardware, Electrek reported Wednesday.

The HW 2.5 adds computing and wiring redundancy which improves reliability, the company told Electrek in a statement Wednesday.

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While all production Model 3, S, and X cars are expected to come with the HW 2.5 upgrade, what about earlier cars which have received the HW 2.0 upgrade?

The company says it will upgrade all these cars to HW 2.5 for free, as per an Engadget report published Wednesday.

According to the Electrek report, the company has opted for an upgrade as the HW 2.0 was not capable of enabling Level 5 autonomy — fully autonomous driving with no need of human interference. The hardware upgrade will also add functionality for Model 3’s driver-facing camera.

As carmakers move from semi-autonomy to full autonomy, the vehicles require more computing power. While Tesla’s Autopilot Level 2 was achieved with 0.256 trillion of operations per second (TOPS), the Level 3-5 autonomy could need around 2-20 TOPS.

Tesla's vehicles are based on Nvidia’s Drive PX2 platform for autonomous driving. Nvidia is currently offering several iterations of the platform and as it evolves and offers more computing power, Tesla might want to upgrade its vehicles accordingly.

According to Nvidia, the minimum computing requirement for fully autonomous cars on its platform would be two processors and two GPUs.

While issuing hardware updates for cars is a tougher task than issuing software ones, Tesla has chosen to keep providing updates instead of coming up with new versions of the same models with just incremental touches like most carmakers do currently.

The technique, which is called retrofitting, makes things a little complicated for Tesla as it would have to fit hardware upgrades on already sold vehicles instead of the ones that are currently in the production stage. However, it is expected to improve customer experience since even previously sold vehicles can now get up-to-date hardware.

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This is an example of how Tesla is disrupting the automotive industry whose youngest established brands are more than 50 years old. Tesla is issuing both hardware and software upgrades to its vehicles.

The company is also getting its cars ready for the day it can actually issue an over-the-air software update and enable full autonomy on its vehicles. The self-driven cars are expected to hit the roads by 2021. While semi-autonomous cars such as the Tesla Model 3 are already available in the market, it remains to be seen if fully autonomous cars will launch according to this timeline.