Tesla's Hardware 3 Problem Nobody's Talking About

Well, welcome back to another Behind the EV Wheel. I appreciate you being here with me, but just wanted to hop in and talk about Tesla, and I'm actually gonna initiate Full Self-Driving here. I'm in a 2022 Model 3 Long Range with Hardware 3 and am locked in at the same version of FSD. The— was it the 12.6.4 version, and just wanted to express some, some difficulty in, in thoughts that I have about Tesla right now, about what the future looks like for this car and what the future looks like for Tesla in general. It seems like it's a very tumultuous time in the, the car industry as well as in the EV industry. I'm not sure how this is all going to shake out. I do like the trend that I'm seeing around Tesla, you know, about being able to come out with some new cars and some excitement about the Robotaxi and the CyberCab that's coming and all this kind of stuff. But I also see a lot of things are going around, around the edges. I just got last night The software patch for this car, uh, it did not say in that patch update exactly what they patched or they improved, so I'm not really sure what that— how that benefits the car because they didn't detail any of the notes that they gave us. So, um, I think that's a little bit of a not-so-great trend line that I'm seeing with Tesla right now, not being transparent. About what they're patching and what they're improving in the vehicle. And then also have been noticing over the last few weeks, it's been a few weeks since I've done an update, that the full self-driving will— I'll be driving down the road and maybe it'll happen here for me and it'll just have an error and it'll just completely fail and it'll pop up on the screen this red steering wheel that says that the, the auto steering or the auto drive capability has, has been disconnected due to an error. And it has nothing to do with any kind of a, like a, I'm not paying attention to the road or anything like that. It'll just randomly happen while I'm driving down the freeway for really no reason at all. So it does kind of make me a little bit anxious about what's going on with the software side of, of Tesla right now. You know, I do love the Full Self-Driving. I'm in it right now and it does an amazing job generally. But this, this disconnect that I've noticed and I, I don't want it to do it on the screen, but I would love to be able to show you. And I'm just wondering if other Tesla owners, if you can get in the comments and make a comment, if you're seeing your Hardware 3 car, just disconnect on Full Self-Driving, just randomly driving down the road, where there's some sort of a software glitch or a conflict, but it can be, I think when it does that, it can be a little dangerous. And I'm a little bit concerned about it. 'Cause depending on when it does it, it can catch people off in a, in a wrong situation. So anyway, I just wanted to pop in here and do another update video on my Behind the Wheel series with my Tesla and share kind of my own experience and to see if others are having the same challenge with their cars too. And I keep waiting for the Hardware 5 to be announced and come out. And I really wonder if that's going to be announced and roll out when we see the, the actual CyberCab actually be announced, as well as the new Roadster that I think is gonna be announced here soon as well. But it does appear that The Robotaxi rollout is going fairly smoothly for Tesla. I haven't heard about any kind of major issues with, with any kind of accidents or any kind of incidents that is going on down in Austin with that particular rollout. So hopefully it'll continue to be a smooth process. And that things will continue to go smoothly and they will be able to roll out to other, other markets here soon. And so anyway, I'm, I'm still excited for the company. As I've said before, I am a shareholder in the company and I do wonder what's next. I do wonder what is going to happen. It does seem like that there's a lot of energy that Tesla has really kind of energized in the market around this robo-taxi concept with what's been going on with Waymo and what's been going on with Lucid and Uber, which I thought was an interesting announcement that, that Uber had partnered with Lucid to, to roll out 20,000 robo-taxis. I didn't even think that You know, I wonder if that connection with Lucid has something to do with the Nvidia chip that was announced here recently. Actually, it was probably about 4 or 5 months ago that they have a new Nvidia chip, AI chip, that, uh, that would help with full self-driving. So I kind of wonder if that's what Lucid and Uber are thinking about, is partnering with the NVIDIA folks to roll out that, that kind of autonomous self-driving chip that the NVIDIA company has right now. I'll have to dig into that a little bit more, but that may be one pathway for other car makers and other kind of autonomous vehicles may be able to catch up to Tesla. Now, I think the big thing is the, the training data that's necessary to roll this out. Even Tesla's having to geofence areas, kind of like what Waymo had to do in order to roll this out, which is— which was a little bit surprising to me. I thought that Tesla's Vision would be able to adapt to any situation, but I have noticed just by looking at this screen right here that the mapping software, the partnership with Google, doesn't really give much detail to Tesla about the environment around us. So now certainly the map here on the screen is pretty detailed, right? It has a lot of that. And I've, I wondered if Tesla couldn't do a better job of kind of mapping this data on the screen. But I do wonder about the processing power that would be required to be able to scan this map kind of on the fly. And also the other factor here is how current is this photograph of of the Earth, right? I mean, was it taken a year ago? Have they done a bunch of changes to the streets? And that may have an impact. You know, there may be complexes that have parking lots that have been expanded, something like that. And there may not be a lot of detail about the parking lots. Now, granted, you look here at this, at this particular location, and you can see a lot of detail in the parking lot, but I have noticed that when the car is in a parking lot, it has very fuzzy, grainy information about anything that's off of the freeway and even the freeway. So there is a— it feels like anyway, there does feel like there's a data gap between what the car is able to utilize and what's available to it and how granular that data is. And that may be What we're seeing with the Teslas needing to do a geofenced area to have a deeper, higher resolution scan of the real environment around it, that's maybe what's coming, is that Google or these platforms are having to do maybe an HD scan of all of these, of all of the traffic areas, all the roadways. Get a deeper HD kind of view of the topography and the roadways and to have a deeper understanding of what's, what's out there. So when the full self-driving has its vision, it can also have the ability to scan a very high-resolution HD map, you know, satellite map of sorts that's up to date and maybe at the ground level too. You start combining all that data together and I think you get a real three-dimensional view of what's out there. It's like what's on the screen here. So you look at what's on the screen here and there's a big difference between the level of detail between the video image and what you see on the screen here. Now, granted, it's going to take processing power in the vehicle to be able to display deep levels of detail on the screen here. And they may be trying to maximize the processing power utilizing on the analyzing of the video to do the full self-driving versus putting forth a lot of data processing to display it on the screen. So there may be a level of detail here that we're just not seeing on our screen because Tesla doesn't prioritize it as something that's important for us to see. So anyway, these are kind of the, the things that are coming up in my mind about what's happening with the Robotaxi and how that rollout's going to happen is at some point here, you know, my, my consideration of buying a new Tesla may become moot at some point somewhat rapidly. If I can just hail a Tesla to take me to where I want to go, I don't have to buy a car. And that may be where we're heading. And that's, that's likely what's going to happen here. Because I'm not feeling any pressure to necessarily buy a new Tesla until they come out with the Hardware 5. I don't want to get caught behind like I got caught with this car. This car is only a couple years old and it's already antiquated to what the capability of the full self-driving stack is today with the 13.0 version. And so that's my thoughts up to this point. Thank you for watching my channel. I appreciate you being here. My name is Rob Greenlee, and I guess if you're watching this, you probably know that because you've seen it on my channel. But like I said, thank you so much for watching and being with me on my my trip on Saturday here and share my thoughts and let me know your thoughts in here. And if you're not subscribed to my channel, please subscribe and I will bring you more updates and more thoughts about what's happening with Tesla along with thousands of other people out there. So thank you very much and we'll see you next time. Bye.