Elon Musk says Tesla will begin a wide release of the latest version of its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software today, v12.5.1. However this won’t be as wide of a release as everyone was hoping for as it will still be limited to vehicles with Hardware 4.0 (HW4), or as it is now referred to, AI4.
Tesla first released v12.5.1 last week, with the update receiving mostly rave reviews from those who were lucky enough to receive it. As it turned out that was only owners of vehicles with the latest self-driving computer, HW4/AI4, which was first introduced in early 2023. This meant the majority of owners with FSD, those with the previous generation HW3/AI3, were left out of the release, with an unknown timeline for when they would receive it.
Musk explained they were taking this approach of focusing on HW4/AI4 for the initial release as getting it ready for HW3/AI3 vehicles would require additional work to optimize the code.
On Monday Musk took to X again to announce the wide release of FSD v.12.5.1, without saying whether this would include HW3/AI3.
FSD 12.5.1 starts wide release today.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2024
Please connect your Tesla to WiFi to receive the update.
However, in a follow-up post, Musk said v12.5.1 would be ready for HW3/AI3 in “about 10 days” due to the “considerable software effort to optimize the code enough to run on HW3.” Although Musk didn’t explicitly state it, this timeline could be pushed further back as it will need to be validated separately from the HW4/AI4 release, so don’t be surprised if we don’t see v12.5.1 on HW3/AI3 cars for another two weeks or more.
It takes considerable software effort to optimize the code enough to run on HW3. It also needs to be validated separately.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2024
Estimated rollout is about 10 days.
It didn’t take long for Tesla to start pushing out software update 2024.20.15, with Drive Tesla reader Marcus receiving it and sharing the release notes with us within 20 minutes of Musk’s post on X. These release notes are the same as the ones included in the initial release last week.
