Is Tesla FSD v13 Coming to HW3/AI3 EV Cars?

Back in my Tesla again today. Going to do a behind the wheel today, so stay tuned here. Um, I'll get started with that in a, in a minute. So this is, this is Rob Greenlee. Thanks for watching my channel. Thank you for being here with me. I'm about to initiate, uh, my Full Self-Driving in my Model 3 2022 Long Range. And if you're a regular viewer of my Behind the Wheel series, uh, welcome back. But if you're new, thank you for, for tuning in and watching my YouTube video here. In my last episode, I kind of spoke about this decision point that I think a lot of Tesla owners are going through right now around whether or not they are going to upgrade their cars to Hardware 4 versus maybe holding on to their Hardware 3 cars. And that proved to be a fairly popular topic to talk about on my channel, and I just wanted to come back and say that I chose not to upgrade right at this moment. I think I was just kind of waiting for things to settle out after the first of the year to see what was going to happen with the incentives and and what was gonna happen with all that. I, I have yet to get the 12— what was it? 12.5.6 update, or is it the 12.6 update? It's the latest build off of the 12.5 stack, which supposedly is coming at any moment here in the next week or so. And I'm hearing some early reports that update may still have some problems. So I guess it is a little bit of a clue that Tesla is struggling to adapt the 13.0 stack over to the Hardware 3 cars. So that kind of puts things in a little bit of a different perspective. Sometimes it is smart to just kind of hang tight for a while when it comes to Tesla and making choices about what you're going to do. One of the other things that's come to my attention is that there has been, or currently is, or has been growing for a while, a large inventory of used Teslas that are for sale. And so I think that element kind of brings into focus kind of two things for me, is that I've also heard that the pool of used hardware for cars may be depleted. Or going fast might be the thing to, to comment about that. And that we will see probably an abundance of Hardware 3 Teslas being put on the market that may not hold on to their lower values— might be a nice way of saying it— because have significantly depreciated in their value over, over the last couple years because of the price reductions that Tesla has done. So, and I think it's, it's a mixed bag. I've seen some people in the industry doing YouTube videos talking about how the depreciation of Tesla is one of the big downsides of owning one. But then again, technology becomes antiquated, becomes less valuable over time. It's the same thing that happens to laptops or the same thing that happens to PCs or desktop computers. And I think increasingly that's how people are seeing their, their cars. And that's probably going to continue because I do think that Tesla is an example of a car manufacturer that's actually not really a carmaker. Tesla is becoming an AI technology platform company that, in my view, is increasingly looking like it's like an HP or Dell or a platform like that that is very good at manufacturing technology. And we may see this same thing happen with robots. The Optimus robot also could have a significant depreciation cycle on that as well. So people, when they buy something like this, they buy a robot, which really Tesla is a robot/ AI agent. For each one of us is that the value that we get from it comes from its abilities. And I'm not sure that you can really look at it like a regular— that it has inherent long-term value because as the technology develops rapidly and improves, the newer versions, same thing that happens with iPads, same thing that happens with iPhones, the newer versions are always better, right? So you can't sell something that has less capabilities for a higher price or the same price when the market has a better version of whatever you're trying to resell. So, so I think this expectation that people have that the cars that they have now from Tesla are going to hold on to their value is kind of a legacy to the earlier years of the automotive industry, and that's just not— I, I just don't see that being the case going forward. So when you buy a vehicle like this, you're going to have to expect significant depreciation on actually owning one and purchasing one. The good side is that these cars do get updated with the latest software, and I think many Hardware 3 car owners are feeling a little bit kind of deceived and maybe have expectations that the cars would be able to be upgraded into infinity for every full self-driving stack that Tesla would ever make. And I, I just don't know that Tesla really knew at that time, like with this car back in 2022, that their Hardware 3 platform would not be able to scale to be able to support the necessary processing power that is required to have a full supervised full self-driving experience. So that is my thinking about it. And I just want to just say, I'm trying to think practically about this. I've disclosed this in prior episodes of my show here that I am a Tesla shareholder. I own a, I own an okay chunk of Tesla stock that I've owned since 2012. Back when I bought it, I first bought a Nissan Leaf back in 2011. I was one of the first 2,000 car owners for the Nissan Leaf in the early days of the electric car. And if you look at this channel and you're going back like 15 years or 14 years or whatever, you can see a lot of the cars that I owned. And I kind of went out and found some very early electric cars like the Zen Electric car as well, which is in this channel, in this Behind the Wheel path. And you can kind of see how far we've come. Those Zen Electric cars, which I got in and did a test drive and made a video of, those cars only went 35 miles an hour and they had a range of like maybe 30 miles and you couldn't drive them very far. They were really like a go-kart or not even a go-kart, like a golf cart might be a good analogy to them. Because they were lightweight. They didn't have a lot of safety things in them. But the cars now that we have are really capable. And I'm increasingly thinking of my car as a robot. I'm not thinking of it as— I mean, it's a vehicle, right, that gets me from one place to another. But I'm increasingly thinking of it as a robot. So as I think about what I'm going to do with technology moving forward with Tesla, because that's how— that's my mindset that I'm going into. So it will likely drive me no pun intended, drive me into buying a Hardware 4. Now, we could see Tesla actually coming out with upgrade path for this car that I could take it into the service center and maybe they'll do a retrofit on the processor unit of this vehicle that will work with the existing cameras that it has to be able to support unsupervised. That may be possible. But I do kind of think that's maybe a half a year out, probably maybe mid-2025 before there's even any possibility that we could see that kind of an outcome here. So I— it's just a choice that you have to make. The longer I hold on to my Model 3 2022 with Hardware 3, probably the less value it's going to have. Now, granted, that was probably going to happen either way. The more miles I put on it, the more It, it's just kind of the, the nature of it. So the question really gets back to is, do I want to spend additional money even on a lower cost 2024 or now 2025 Model 3? Because it probably will cost a little bit more money because of taxes and because of the incentives and the rebates and all this stuff won't cover the total cost difference between what I can sell this car for and what I can buy a, a brand new Model 3. And the other question is, do I want to buy a Model Y? I don't really like the Y. I'm really more of a sedan, sports car type of a guy at this point in my life. And this Model 3 is just a rocket ship. I mean, it's been an amazing vehicle for me and I really enjoy driving it. Or in this particular case, like I have done in this whole video, I'm actually not driving anything. I'm just sitting in the car and the car's doing everything, which is revolutionary. I mean, I've never had a car that does this. It's only been able to do this for me over the, really in a robust way for the last maybe 6, 8 months. So I haven't been an FSD subscriber for really very long. So, so anyway, my takeaway is that I probably will continue to look at trying to pick up a 2025 Model 3 at some point and see when, probably sooner than later. I just have to juggle the finances of it and figure out what it is. Because the longer I wait, I think it may be, it may cost me more money to upgrade because of the value of this car will keep declining. I would like to hear whether or not Tesla has an upgrade path. So if they have an upgrade path to upgrade the processor in this this car and that upgrade is $1,000, $2,000, I probably would do it because that would probably save me a lot of money, a lot of hassle. I still love this car. I still want to hold on to my car. That would be a way that Tesla could follow through on what their promise has been, is that these cars would be able to support unsupervised full self-driving, which is kind of what I thought it was going to be able to do when I purchased it. Back in 2022. So, so anyway, I appreciate you watching this, and it's great to be able to do a video like this in the car while I'm driving and not have to worry about driving. And I can just focus on just watching the road because this camera up here is watching everything that I'm doing. And as long as I keep an eye on the road, it does everything, and I can talk to you. So Thank you for watching this. I appreciate it. And, and I hope you'll come back and catch my next update. Hopefully I'll have good news that I've decided to get the upgrade. And I hope Tesla puts out some information here soon about whether or not there's an upgrade path for the processor in this compute, this particular car's computer, which I've gotten the impression was kind of something they were considering for a long time. And I think. The big hurdle to some degree is— I'm not quite sure why it slammed on the brakes all of a sudden, but I think the big hurdle is the video quality of the 8 cameras that this car has. I don't know if there's— they're gonna have to upgrade the megapixel capability of the video cameras. But well, thank you so much for watching this, and I'll see you on the next video. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Here's my Tesla Model 3. Let's get out of the car and I will show it to you from the outside if you haven't seen it. And this is it from the outside. So I'm sure most, most of you that are watching this have seen a Model 3, but I just wanted to show you mine so you could see the car that I was— I've been doing this series in. Thanks, bye-bye.