New Tesla patent to aid with HW3,HW4 support and beyond.

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So the model runs at half the speed due to deplaning but still requires the same amount of RAM?

Wow that was one heck of a read, from people way smarter than me... but wouldn't a camera retrofit still be required for any of this to work on par with current HW4 vehicles as an example?

As a HW3 you should just give up on any dreams and hopes of FSD even coming close to where even v14 is at

I’ll eventually upgrade, but any improvement is welcome in the meantime. HW4 will ultimately face the same situation where the hardware can’t keep up with the software. If this helps in any way, it’s a win for everyone.

Exactly that yes. Complex calculations are broken in smaller pieces (not exactly half but probably averages there), so you have more calculations to do, but they are also shrunk so you don’t need more space to store these new calculations. But that doesn’t mean you get the exact same decision/reaction to a situation at 2x time every single time. The decisions most likely will still differ and there will be an apparent difference between HW4 and HW3 behavior in this case too. The smaller model will still be approximating decisions, just with more confidence and control because of the complexity of new calculations.

Agree that’s why I’ve held off on HW4, will wait 1.5-2 years and swap my 2023 HW3 with AI5 Juniper

Transferring FSD isn’t always guaranteed though and Elon just mentioned it’ll be subscription only going forward starting in Feb. 2026

I also got a 2023 Model 3. Will keep it at least 8 years. Hopefuly by then well be closer to Ai6. Would like to eventually trade up to a Model Y. Getting older and need a car thats higher off the ground.

Yeah my wife's HW4 car we did a recent free trial of 14.2.x and it's freaking amazing BUT owning a HW3 car I'm not getting a new one until they've really proven they have this solved. Like sit in the back seat solved. Maybe it will be soon and maybe it won't and will require HW5. We won't know until we're there. In the meanwhile anything they can do to get us a better model on HW3 after a year of no improvements is welcome (although I do feel like it got better mid-late November even though the FSD version didn't change. Maybe they're pre-processing the images better or something).

Not way smarter than you. They literally just took the patent and fed it into ChatGPT and posted the result on X.

Note: this is not a patent, it is an application and a very early one at that.

This announcement is to lock in the number of HW3 vehicles that they will have to update to get the full FSD. I think they will have an upgrade solution soon and don't want a bunch of HW3 owners buying FSD to get that hardware upgrade.

It reads like the main beneficiary here is Tesla, in that they don't have to cater so much to differing hardware. There's still, like, physical limitations as to what they have to work with regardless (RAM, storage, etc.), so improvements? Sure. Par performance? No.

I was told at the service center today that the current FSD transfer program is likely to end 3/31/26.

Wont be HW4, hopefully AI5 but depending on how well it improves over the next few years and whether it passes NHTSA standards it might even be AI6

Oo hot goss any more info or rationale on this?

At a high level, it’s basically a more sophisticated form of quantization. It may be novel, but it doesn't really feel groundbreaking. If you’re not deep in the AI world it can be easy to miss the trend, but we've already seen models that once required extremely expensive compute steadily make their way onto consumer hardware. It's been clear for a while that the same dynamic will play out for self-driving models as well. Newer, more capable models will increasingly be made to run on older compute through better inference and compression techniques. It's just not something you hear about because it's technical and boring. But it's there.

this is awesome!

Is anyone's HW3 creeping through red lights or sometimes full on passing red lights? Mine literally will keep creeping into a crosswalk, and eventually, it will be so deep in, it will just decide to speed up and through the red light.

Well robotaxi is on the road in austin. And tesla is stop selling FSD in a month.

Nope. I also asked them about the change to subscription only for FSD. I wanted to know how that affects the luxe package. My concern is that it shifts to a “lifetime subscription” type deal like the premium connectivity. What this means is that it would disappear on transfer of ownership and you lose that value when you sell your car eventually.

I don't understand most things, but why don't they design the chips to be plug and play? When hw3 or hw4 gets old, unplug it and plug in a hw5 or hw6 chip?

Mine does not do that. One time at a light recently though it kept lurching. Felt like accerating with the brake on. Kept doing it every few seconds until I turned off fsd. It never actually moved forward though. One time several months ago me and this other car were completely stopped at the red light for a good bit. The guy next to me started moving forward, as if he was going through the red light but stopped at the last minute. For whatever reason my car started going and would have blown the red light if I didn't brake. Has never done it since that day, I blame some odd interaction or big with the guy next to me.

Yes but no real progress on number of cars or safety driver. I hope for the best but this isn’t a sure thing.

Then I wait. It’s a nice car, FSD or no FSD.

Assuming it can keep up with necessary speed of processing. That latency could be impactful.

HW2.5 is actually able to be upgraded to HW3. Then the thermal and power and size requirements changed enough with HW4 that it wasn't a simple swap in anymore.

My read of this is that HW3 gets better math on a smaller brain, not a bigger brain. That mean what ever model they run on HW3’s memory will run at higher precision. What I don’t understand is how they are going to get the 10GB+ model to run properly on 8GB HW3 RAM without significant performance degradation. Can someone explain that to me? I cant help but be cynical in thinking that HW3 will see small improvements on the current version of FSD but any thoughts of it achieving parity with V14 is silly.

They could just have discontinued the ability to buy on HW3 cars.

So maybe the promise that older teslas will actually get FSD could play out? It might be way past the vehicles lifespan so they wouldn’t actually give it to consumers but theoretically?

At that point you might as well wait for AI6. But if you wait for so long you might as well wait for AI7. Do you see the pattern?

I'm reminded of the mainframe computer age which then became the PC age and then the mobile age... Hardware improves as software gets more efficient and sooner or later, the compute is cheap and accessible.

Agree, they are great cars :)

Thats great news. Its sad seeing these cool things come out and knowing you wont get them.

My car is a 2023, I dont need to change it yet. 2027 maybe. AI6/AI7 will be what 2031 and 2035? Not waiting that long. HW3->HW4 doesn't make sense for me, personally, since HW4 is still not perfect. Hopefully AI5 will crack it.

What lifespan are you talking about, HW3 only phased out 2 years ago.

Quantizing the model makes it smaller, and therefore take less memory.

That felt like AI slop.

But they wanted that $8k. They probably actually thought they could do it on HW3. I think ELon Musk legit thought they were a year away from FSD for this last decade. They had so many good calls on stuff, they had no reason to doubt their ability to make predictions...back then. Obviously we know they are bullocks at making predictions.

FWIW I’ve been told by someone whose been in video engineering for decades that they have been doing this for decades when having to work with 8 bit restrictions, and they were doubtful a patent would be issued since nothing he read on X post explaining it was anything new. He said it is more time consuming to write the code as opposed to simply writing to a large bit chip but these situations are nothing new.

Robotaxi is live in what 0.1% of the country? 0.01% ? HW4 is unlikely to make it to true unsupervised (you can sit/sleep in the back, anywhere in the country). Hence AI5 and already announced AI6.

If I'm in front, mine loves to creep. Very scary...

Re: when ai6/7, no one knows I hear HW3 FSD is fine on M3/MY. It’s absolutely shit on MS and presumably MX too. So much so that I was perfectly OK transferring FSD from my MS to the new MY my parents got. They love it. I’ve tried it and the performance is literally a chasm that don’t think HW3 FSD will ever come close to

I’ve not tried it on HW4 but have on my MY HW3 - it’s definitely an impressive system but not there yet

My comment was mainly referring to the cost of FSD. It is the last time you can leg in without paying renewal fee in your private car. By the time it's ready unsupervised, you won't want to pay monthly fee for FSD because it will be so much higher plus they will charge you Tesla insurance fee. At that time, it would only make sense to hail a tesla cab, rather than using your own car. We are not talking about the same thing here.

Ah gotcha. Yeah agree, when they finally crack true unsupervised the price will go up for sure

Computer boards are a lot more than just the chip that sits on it.

Well, if it goes up a ton I just won't buy it.

For me it’s impressive if the standard is basic lane keep assist and auto breaking safety features from other manufacturers. It’s not very impressive compared to HW4 FSD in my eyes. No way in hell I’m spending $100/mo on HW3 FSD on a MS.

No FSD V12 on HW3 is definitely better than Autosteer and TACC, it drove me around the city ok. I did have to disengage often tho.

If I have to disengage then that kind of defeats the purpose. FSD on a Juniper is easy no disengagements at all on most drives. I wish they allowed V11 rollback. The last version of 11.x was way better than the BS they’ve added in 12

hw4 is also 8gb of ram.

My understanding is that HW4 is 16GB. Have to leave a few GB buffer for O/S as well so actual usable memory is a bit less. Source: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/hardware-4-teardown-shows-how-tesla-shifted-resources-toward-the-autopilot-computer-219735.html

To me it sounds like this could improve the driving logic, allowing them squeeze in a better model to handle more edge cases (the long tail). A lack of a better camera might introduce different edge cases, but at least for unique situations closer to the vehicle, this could help solve those edge cases by squeezing in a “smarter” model that otherwise wouldn’t fit in HW3. ELI5 would be like getting smarter person driving a car, but their eyesight didn’t improve. More importantly, I’d be surprised if this patent gets granted. This is a technique, not a product. If anything it’s just trade secret (that they now revealed). It’s closer to something like Google’s search algorithm.

When version 11 came out they thought they were really close and offered free trials to everybody and it was terrifying. I really don't know what they were thinking.

My house is very close to a freeway. When I turn FSD on to get home, the cars turns into the on ramp for the southbound freeway instead of turning onto the street for my house. Actually unusable. It's a good 100ft apart, but the car can't figure it out.

The current version has some seriously broken navigation. Two steps forward, one step back.

Yes I agree but there is no such thing as free lunch. Quantising will result in accuracy loss and that seems like a big deal to me on a system as critical as FSD. I’m not a software engineer so happy for someone to weigh in and tell me it will all be fine. As an HW3 owner, I’m rooting for solutions, but I’m not betting on them given the fundamental limitations I currently see

"However, three years later, the AI team might develop a massive new Transformer model or an Occupancy Network that performs best with 16-bit or 32-bit data." This is a crux of the argument? Why would they do that? Edge deployments should always be severely quantized. This is useless

Nobody knows if it will be fine or not. Tesla would certainly prefer not to have to follow through on Elon's statements about upgrading HW3 FSD owners. No doubt they'll be happy to find something that is not quite as good as HW4 if they can avoid hardware upgrades. It's not just about HW upgrades, though. There's all of the non-FSD owners (subscribers) that would benefit, and maybe someday they'll actually come back around and give standard autopilot some much-needed love.

My HW3 can’t even show backup/side cameras in Reverse without stuttering. Quantization tweaks aren’t going to fix that.

So what it sounded like was being said was it can take years to get things like these models running on older hardware. So I was saying by the time we get to the point where maybe FSD could run on HW3 it’ll be like 10+ years and Tesla won’t see a point in updating those cars? Does that make more sense?

Yeah this is great, but sounds very early and theoretical. I still want my car upgraded to HW4.

No, the hardware on HW3 has to be updated as well. The parent comment is being a little ridiculous

The cameras are easies already outdated on top of there being fewer, and would need to be upgraded to get the same level of reliability. You cannot keep arbitrarily “optimizing” and “compressing” models like this

Elon just said on X that it's already been implemented

I asked grok about it. She had a good explanation.

I could be wrong. But it sounds like to me they plan to use this software trick to upgrade HW3 cars to HW4 levels of FSD. Then use the same software trick to upgrade HW4 to HW5. This would be great for HW3. I think version 14 as it is right now is worth the $100 a month. They should get alot of subscribers.

They got v12 on hw3 in like 3 months. Then they realized it got to an acceptable level to optimize the new features on HW4 first before spending time to port to HW3.

Quantization is interesting. There's a really curious question of just how far you can push it and how small and efficient you can make models. It's no surprise that we're still pushing on this frontier given how new deep learning is, but it's fascinating to see the developments year over year. Can't wait to see where this all ends up five years from now. As far as Tesla goes specifically, I am curious how many more hardware versions or chips are needed for FSD to get where it needs to be. Seems like [14.2.2.2](http://14.2.2.2) is very close. Elon pushing for public robotaxi tells me that he is basically mandating progress at this point and soon. No more passively tinkering around with experiments. Seems like he's asking unsupervised FSD to actually happen ASAP, or to at least know what will be needed to actually get there. I don't find this surprising after Tesla's made such massive investments.

>You cannot keep arbitrarily “optimizing” and “compressing” models like this I mean, based on the patent it sounds like that's their long term plan for HW3. All they have to do is make unsupervised FSD "good enough" for the people who still own FSD and HW3 in the future. All other HW3 cars will have FSD stripped from them as people trade them in over time (this is already happening, you can't buy a used HW3 car anymore from Tesla that comes w/ FSD). Even if this patent ends up being a nothing burger Tesla can just keep moving the goal posts in the future. Anything to avoid having to upgrade the hardware.

\>this is already happening, you can't buy a used HW3 car anymore from Tesla that comes w/ FSD brother they've almost always done that, I've never seen an inventory car in the past 4 years with FSD, it's literally a software toggle for them and they want the car to be a reasonable market price, not forcing FSD to be baked into the cost on used stock, especially with them wanting people to pay monthly in the first place \>I mean, based on the patent it sounds like that's their long term plan for HW3. All they have to do is make unsupervised FSD "good enough" for the people who still own FSD and HW3 in the future. You don't understand the memory constraints HW3 is hitting besides the issues with the compute ceiling, Tesla themselves has already stated this is what will most likely make V14 one of if not the last major FSD version for HW3. The other consideration is the cameras themselves, they are incredibly out of date and reduce the reliability of the whole system, especially given the lack of the front camera for park and unpark and potential FSD integration.

It was a recent change made around when v12 was released. The used 2022 I bought in 2024 direct from Tesla came with FSD included as did a lot of them on their site. They were also about the same price as an equivalent used Tesla without FSD.

That's already past the basic warranty for many HW3 cars. (edit - forgot a letter)

Is it? If they can save space, the limiting factor trying to put the new models on HW3 last I read, then couldn't that quantization and other tech reasonably get around hardware limits once it reached a sufficiently advanced stage?

To add: v12.6.4 is the current version for HW3 where it is the unofficial v13 FSD Lite. HW3 got hit with the memory capacity issue. HW4 is facing the similar memory limit... [Source](https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/2655/teslas-fsd-v13-pushes-hw4-hardware-capabilities-end-of-line-for-hw3). HW3 is fortunate to get v14 FSD Lite. [Source](https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/3263/tesla-to-bring-fsd-v14-lite-to-hardware-3-vehicles). But Tesla needs to upgrade our handicapped HW3 to HW4 equiavalent that would run unsupervised FSD in the future. I'm on that boat waiting for that complimentary upgrade.

Hardware limit can't be worked around for indefinite. No matter how much quantization or compression they use, HW3 users will lose some features or quality that won't match the original design. New hardware is needed, especially more memory.

Elon is pushing ahead because he is incentivized to do so from his $1T pay package from Tesla. [Source](https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/inside-teslas-1-trillion-pay-proposal-ceo-elon-musk-2025-09-05/). FSD active subscriptions (10 million) and 1 milion robotaxies in operation are part of the requirements of his incentives.

I agree and I hate when e-journalists can't get this right even after being notified. Patent application is the correct way to call it. Not even a granted patent.

Because over time, different hardware requirements come along and make old ones obsolete.

Reboot your car by pressing down the two wheel scrolls. See if that helps.

No one said indefinite.

I appreciate the reply, but I've owned a Tesla for 11 years so I'm familiar with the reboot procedure. It happens constantly.

I have both a HW3 and a new HW4 Y and I’m sorry to report FSD isn’t as different as others are saying.

Huh. My 22 basic warranty expires later THIS year and isnt relevant to software. Don't forget 2016 and 2017 models still getting updates this past year for infotainment and FSD.

Thank you for providing sources. Exactly.

I have a HW3 MS and Juniper: FSD on hw3 ms is fundamentally broken. Worth maybe $10/mo

Right, I'm just saying the warranty expires, which means you're already at the point the vehicle is becoming more expensive just to own. 2016/17 models have lost their battery/drive train warranty already, too - you can't expect most people to hold onto a ticking time bomb of an out-of-warranty battery replacement, but that's exactly Tesla's plan. (forgot a letter in my last comment - didn't mean "any", but "many" HW3 are out of warranty by now)

I get where you're coming from, they can just wait it out to some degree. However, I come from a family of "drive it to the ground" owners. That being said, I would consider trading in for new, if they released the MY LL in the USA.

I totally get that! Same here - especially knowing the carbon impact of EV production is higher than ICE vehicles, so I have a strong incentive to keep it around as long as possible. I'll be driving my current car to the ground, for sure - but once I'm out of the battery warranty, and once the battery fails, I think I'll strongly be considering other brands just because of Elon's and Tesla's decisions in recent years - and a large part of me is doubting I'll ever see Unsupervised at this point, being on HW3, because they *can* just wait for my car to be driven to the ground out of warranty. But others, who didn't buy it primarily for the environmental factors, might not be comfortable (or able to afford) replacement or buying a new car once it's out of warranty, and they'll have even less of a chance than you or I to get Unsupervised, or >v12, while their vehicle is even technically supported (even with these advancements)

Yes the carbon impact of production is \*slightly\* higher than ICE production; however, EVs breakeven is around 25,000 miles on the road, for some owners that's done as quickly as 9 months, for others about 2 years of ownership, so I like that every 25k miles I'm displacing an ICE vehicle. For selling, I think the sweet spot is right after 6 years in my opinion, so that the next owner gets at least a year of warranty. I think the only way I'll ever consider purchasing another Tesla is if I can transfer purchasedFSD to a new vehicle, or if its forever on my account.

Oh, really? I haven't done the math in a while, but it would be great to know I'm helping more than I thought! Even my home charging is 100% carbon-neutral, so I would guess I might be in that 'sooner' group. I think I'm with you on the last point, too - although, if Elon is still around (an obvious can of worms I'm not looking to get into lol), then I'll almost certainly go elsewhere anyway.

https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/3517/tesla-announces-fsd-transfers-are-ending Just saw this, so they must have publicly announced it

That’s probably more of a problem with the Atom processor that handles what’s shown on the screen. My HW3 car with Ryzen processor doesn’t stutter when showing cameras. The FSD processing happens on a completely different chip anyways.

I dunno, I really like my max speed option on v13 Why would anyone use a car without cruise control?

Huh? I’m confused, this is about HW3 coming anywhere close to HW4, not HW3 downgrading down to cruise control

Just wait until HW10, I hear that’s when it’s gonna be good

I’m not disappointed I’m not getting upgrades right now because v14 took away the max speed option

It’s fine. Standard goes like 5-7 over at highway speeds. Chill basically stays at the speed limit. Hurry goes into the low 80s. Mad max, mid 80s