- Tesla’s fleet of cars equipped with HW3 and Full Self-Driving may be experiencing some issues.
- Some owners report that the new version of Tesla’s software is overheating their Autopilot computers.
- Some report getting locked out of FSD, or even hardware failures.
Some Tesla owners are reporting that their Autopilot computers—the hardware responsible for running Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software—are having issues.
Specifically, owners of cars with Tesla’s last-gen Hardware 3 computers are reporting temporary failures that render FSD unusable for a period of time, while others say that the boards are failing outright. The culprit? While no official answer exists, some owners are pointing their fingers at Tesla’s newest FSD V14 Lite update.
Some owners on X report that their cars’ computers have reached as high as 102 degrees Celsius (215-degrees Fahrenheit) since updating to Tesla’s new FSD V14 Lite. For reference, that’s about double the idle temperature of the car computer. Even Nvidia’s flagship H100 datacenter GPU has a maximum temperature limit of 87-degrees—so 102-degrees is hot.
Just like your home computer can’t run the latest and greatest version of a frontier AI chat model like those served up by OpenAI or Anthropic, millions of Teslas built between 2019 and 2023 don’t have the compute horsepower to run the full version FSD’s latest release. Tesla responded by releasing a distilled version of V14, called V14 Lite.
HW3 has around an eighth of the memory bandwidth compared to Tesla’s current HW4 and half the memory capacity. Tesla is even planning to double the memory in its refreshed HW4 “plus” hardware, meaning that HW3 owners will be left with one-fourth of the total available memory compared to modern Teslas. That’s why HW3 “simply does not have the capability,” for unsupervised self-driving, according to CEO Elon Musk.
Now back to the problem. Tesla’s system is set to force a disengagement of FSD when the computer exceeds 90 degrees. It also makes sure that the software stays locked out until the computer cools off. Some who have experienced issues have gone into the service mode in their cars and found an overheating problem. Others have shared issues with FSD becoming unavailable since upgrading to V14 Lite without specifically noting temperature.
A few have reported needing a new Autopilot computer after upgrading to the new FSD version. One individual shared a story of a family member on X who experienced an FSD failure after V14 Lite was deployed during their road trip. The person was told by a Tesla Service center that they needed a new Autopilot computer.
To be sure, right now all we’re seeing are anecdotes. It’s not clear how widespread this issue is, and there are many owners on X saying their similar cars have been working fine. It’s also not clear if the issues people are experiencing are directly related to installing V14 Lite or something else. The automaker sold between 3 and 4 million HW3-equipped cars between 2019 and 2023 and just began rolling out its latest update around two weeks ago. Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.
It’s possible there’s an easy software fix. Musk has also acknowledged that Tesla will have to bite the bullet and build “micro factories” to upgrade customers’ HW3 cars. Tesla promised back in 2016 that all of its cars had the hardware necessary for self-driving. It has since deleted the blog post that made the claim and moved from HW2.5 to HW3 to HW4. It will soon be moving to HW4.5 and beyond to address the increased compute needs necessary for unsupervised autonomy.
“Unfortunately, HW3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD. We did think at one point it would have that,” said Musk during Tesla’s Q1 earnings call earlier this year.