Tesla begins limited rollout of FSD v14 Lite to HW3 cars

Tesla has begun a limited rollout of its Full Self-Driving v14 Lite software to owners of older vehicles equipped with Hardware 3, marking the first major update for these cars in over a year. The company's AI lead, Ashok Elluswamy, confirmed the deployment to an early-access group of customers starting on June 29.

The update represents a significant technical effort to adapt advanced driving software designed for newer Hardware 4 systems to run on the older, less powerful Hardware 3 computer. Engineers distilled the driving behavior and intelligence from the Hardware 4 version of FSD v14, allowing the older system to learn from the newer one. This process brings improvements including reinforcement learning and offline models to the legacy fleet.

According to release notes, the software enhances both proactive and reactive responsiveness in scenarios such as navigation, highway merges, interactions with pedestrians and traffic lights, and responding to other vehicles cutting in. It also aims to improve driving comfort by reducing false slowdowns and providing smoother steering and more consistent lane centering. New features include automated parking, unparking, and reversing...