Tesla executives announced on Wednesday’s earnings call that the company will launch a “lite” version of its latest Full Self-Driving (Supervised) version for vehicles equipped with Hardware 3.
Answering investor questions, placed on the Say Technologies platform up until Tuesday, CFO Vaibhav Taneja said that the company has “not completely given up on Hardware 3.”
After failing to deliver on his 2016 promise that all vehicles built from then on would have “all necessary hardware for full self-driving capability,” Musk admitted in late last year that vehicles with HW3 weren’t powerful enough for the software.
A retail investor questioned why the company couldn’t “give an equal incentive to trade in for a new vehicle,” instead of trying to “replace HW3 with HW4” — a question that was upvoted by 1,200 shareholders, representing 1 million shares.
According to Taneja, the company has offered customers multiple promotions “over the last year,” including the free transfer of FSD to a new (Tesla) vehicle, adding that “if they’ve got FSD, they can get better preferential rates.”
“We’ve been taking care of this,” the CFO noted. However, the company wants “to solve autonomy first,” and only then “come back with a way to take care of these customers.”
To Taneja, customers with HW3 are very important, as “they were the early adopters.”
Earlier this month, Tesla released Version 14 of the FSD software, first available to an early access group of testers.
In just two weeks, the company has released three updates, introducing new driving modes and releasing the software to a wider public.
Musk said on Wednesday that “anyone in the US can get Version 14 if they just go and select ‘I want the advanced software’ in their car.”
For Hardware 3 users, Tesla‘s VP of AI Software said that “once the V14 release series is fully done,” the company is “planning on working on a V14 Lite version.”
According to the executive, this version is “probably expected in the second quarter of next year.”
The company’s CFO updated investors on the software adoption, which he said has seen “decent progress,” despite the total paid FSD customer base remaining “small,” at “around 12% of our current fleet.”
The FSD software is available for purchase in the United States with a single payment of $8,000 or through a monthly subscription priced at $99.
The system is also available in Canada, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and more recently, Australia and New Zealand.
Taneja also reiterated that the company is working with regulators to expand the service across the globe.
“We’re moving. We’re working with regulators in places like China and EMEA [Europe, the Middle East, and Africa] to obtain approvals so that we can get FSD in those regions as well,” he noted.
Tesla has received testing permits for the software in several European countries, having shared several videos of the FSD undergoing testing in cities such as Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam or Rome.
The Full Self-Driving system is still “awaiting regulatory approval” in the Old Continent.
Earlier this year, it was introduced in China; however, it faces several hardware limitations and has led customers to accuse Tesla of consumer fraud.
