Old Teslas Starting Getting Full Self-Driving v14 Lite

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One of the gripes of early Tesla “Full Self Driving” adopters (like me) is we were told that our cars would have all of the hardware necessary for true full self driving — the kind where you can go to sleep or watch a movie while the car drives. Recently, Tesla Technoking Elon Musk conceded that the hardware on cars like mine really wasn’t going to cut it. The company is now planning to offer hardware retrofits to such cars … at some point.

In the meantime, though, Tesla software engineers are working on trying to give us Full Self Driving (FSD) that’s something like what drivers with Tesla’s latest hardware have. That is being called “Full Self-Driving V14 Lite.” However, repeating what I basically already said above, Musk recently said they they’ve determined this really isn’t going to ever be hands-off, eyes-off self driving. Still, better than what we have been using! That’s the idea anyway.

The news this week is that Full Self-Driving V14 Lite has started rolling out to these older Teslas. (I have not received an opportunity to update yet.) Note that this older self-driving hardware is referred to as “Hardware 3,” whereas what newer Teslas have is “Hardware 4,” which includes more cameras, better cameras, and better computers, among other things. The following are the full release notes for FSD V14 Lite:

• Distilled the intelligence from HW4 V14 into HW3. This allows HW3 to directly learn how to handle scenarios using HW4 V14 as a guide. This process unlocks the improvements that have been made to HW4 including Reinforcement Learning (RL) and offline models for HW3.
• Improved both proactive and reactive responsiveness across a wide variety of categories including navigation handling, merges and forks, pedestrian interactions, traffic lights, and vehicle cut-in scenarios.
• Improved general comfort in nominal scenarios through fewer false slowdowns, smoother steering and more consistent lane centering.
• Introduced parking, unparking, and reversing capabilities.
• Added Arrival Options for you to select where FSD should park: in a Parking Lot, on the Street, in a Driveway, or at the Curbside.
• Speed Profiles are now available at all times, to further customize driving style preference.

Tesla Head of AI Ashok Elluswamy has added the following:

“FSD v14 Lite is now rolling out to AI3 early-access customers. Based on the feedback, will rollout to more customers over the next few weeks. This build distills the driving behavior from AI4’s v14 series into both the camera and compute config of AI3. It includes destination options and speed profiles on city roads, but more importantly significantly improved safety. We hope you’ll enjoy it, once the build ships wide.”

So, that’s that.

Once I get FSD v14 Lite on my car, I’ll do some testing and provide readers here and subscribers on the CleanTechnica YouTube channel with an honest, objective take on how well the updated firmware works.

As far as when Tesla would start implementing a full solution for initial legacy Full Self Driving owners — retrofitting their cars via “microfactories” across the USA (and world?) — we don’t have any info on that at the moment.