FSD 12.6 is Coming But There's a Catch | Tesla Update

Welcome back to Behind the Wheel. My name is Rob Greenlee, and thank you so much for tuning into my channel again and watching my Behind the Wheel series. I don't have the best of news on, on the front of FSD, full self-driving, for my 2022 Model 3 Long Range. As I have seen in the news, there's been some rollout of the 12.6 version of FSD. I am still on the 12.5.4, so what you're going to see in, in the video today is not going to be a review of the 12.6, which I would have loved to have brought you, but it appears that the news is that this has been rolling out very slowly to a limited set of users, I guess, primarily on Model S and Model X models that have Hardware 3. And, but I guess as of January 23rd, which was just a couple days ago, the 12.6 is rolling out to Model 3s and maybe Model Ys that have Hardware 3. So I'm expecting to get it, the upgrade, basically any time now. So that's what I'm expecting at this point. So we shall see. I just initiated the full self-driving on the car, so it's going to drive now. Just wanted to talk about that a little bit and just Share, if you're a Hardware 3 Tesla car owner, this has been a really long wait that we've been having to wait for really any kind of an upgrade on the Full Self-Driving stack. And so I guess it really tells us that Tesla is having a really a challenge with getting the Hardware 3 cars upgraded, right? To get them better. While we've seen the version 13 kind of move on with new levels of kind of software updates for hardware 4 cars, this has been one of those things that is increasingly making myself and other hardware 3, AI 3 car owners a little bit concerned about how much improvement are we going to see going forward with the current cars that we have? And so I think there's even the people that have gotten the early, like the X and the S users with Hardware 3, have been giving it mixed reviews, even the current upgrade. Yeah. So some of the capabilities that I see the end-to-ends driving with the highway capability, or the freeway end-to-end kind of capability I thought was in the earlier versions of the Full Self-Driving. So I thought it was already there, but it looks like it's part of this new 12.6 release. I guess it really gets back to, at the end of the day, I'm happy with the Full Self-Driving I have right now. It, it does pretty much most of everything. It's just one of those technology envy things, right? It's everybody wants improvement. Everybody wants to have it better. Everybody wants to upgrade. And I'm increasingly accepting maybe the fate that we're never going to get to 13.0. I'm giving Tesla a break on this to think maybe, maybe they're going to get there. It's just going to take a lot more time. My question for them is if they're investing a lot of resources in trying to move the Full Self-Driving stack to Hardware 3, and it requires just a tremendous amount of team resources to, to make that happen, that maybe could potentially hold back the 13.0 And for Hardware 4 and the upgrades to potentially Hardware 5 that may be coming is my concern. Now granted, most cars in the Tesla fleet today are Hardware 3, AI 3 cars. Those are big factors that Tesla needs to consider here. And why I'm covering this is that I'm trying to share my thoughts on this process that we're going through. And I think it maybe— I don't know if it's comforting or if it just is increasingly inspiring all of us to consider upgrades. But like I've talked about in my prior videos, is that's going to just create a huge amount of cars that are sitting for sale, maybe that are just not going to be able to be upgraded to be able to move with the progress of this. And I think that is maybe not a good situation for Tesla. So maybe also part of this delay is maybe Tesla is not investing as much resources in developer time in supporting the Hardware 3 AI cars because they have another plan. And maybe that plan is to come up with a way that they can upgrade the processors in these cars to support the existing cameras that are in this car. But that's going to require some, probably some significant hardware and software processes for them to come up with something that they can easily cost-effectively You take your car into the service center and they open up your trunk and they basically remove the existing processor unit that's in the vehicle and they install basically a new one that maybe has hardware 4, maybe hardware 4.5, or some basis that has software that can take the existing video cameras that are in this car, which are lower resolution than the newer cars have and be able to make the car do what almost a parity for what the hardware in the hardware 4 cars have with version 13. Because I would imagine that eventually we're going to be moving up to version 14 of the FSD stack. So This is just an intriguing thing for all of us to think about. I know I'm thinking about it and I'm trying to understand, should I just be patient now? The other thing that I've heard, and maybe many of you have heard this too, is that there has been some hardware problems with the newer hardware for vehicles where the processor unit that was installed in those newer Teslas with the Hardware 4 AI 4 processing chips, those cars were failing and they were needing to be, to be taken back to the service center and have their, I believe, their whole computer processors repaired somehow or replaced because of a hardware problem. Now, I haven't heard any recent updates to this, but To be quite honest with you, that's what caused me to hesitate a little bit on upgrading, buying a new Tesla, was this concern about even the new AI processors in the new cars having the potential of failing. Now granted, I would imagine that Tesla's been pretty attentive to this, but I haven't heard any commentary about how that problem has been corrected or fixed that would keep it from happening again. Now granted, comment in the comment area of this video and let me know if you've heard of anything that says that Tesla has corrected the hardware issues that was coming up with the new Hardware 4 vehicles that were coming out, and also if there's any update on when the Hardware 5 platform is going to be launched and released into their vehicles, or is that going to be reserved primarily for the Robotaxi? So these are questions that I have in my mind. And, but really, to be entirely honest, I'm happy with the car the way it drives right now. I don't really, I don't know that I have to have all these capabilities in the car to really dramatically improve my driving experience with Full Self-Driving. So all of us just need to step back and say $100 a month to get what we're getting is probably still a good value. So I'm still optimistic. I'm still hopeful that we will see this upgrade path, but I'm also okay with where I'm at. I'm not, you know, worried about it. I'm not looking forward to spending another $2,000 or $3,000 on a hardware update just from a money standpoint. But if that day comes, I will have to face it and pick the path of maintaining the value of this vehicle into the future. Because right now, I think the path that this vehicle's on going into the future is not very good, and its usefulness in the new kind of autonomous robotic vehicle landscape is just not— it's not going to be part of it. It's going to be a relic of an earlier era. Thank you so much for watching my video here as I drive on Sunday to Costco again, which is my typically my every 2-week journey, and I like to make my videos on, on the road while I'm doing that with the full self-driving stack. I was down in Orlando for this last week at a podcasting conference, and I'm the chairperson of the Podcast Hall of Fame, so I was leading that. And, but like I said, thank you so much for being here with me. I appreciate it. Please subscribe to my channel. I, I have a fairly low subscription percentage, but if you want to get updated videos from me, I, I would greatly appreciate it. And thank you so much for watching today. So bye-bye. Thanks. Thanks, bye-bye.