Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/Chesnot
Topics: Elon Musk, Tesla, Technology, Cars
Gerrard Kaonga
Tesla could have to shell out billions after a new ruling from a judge regarding the cars’ self-driving mechanism.
Elon Musk’s car company Tesla could have to replace the computers within million of vehicles and this won’t be cheap...
The company could be forced to replace the ‘self-driving’ computer of about 4 million vehicles or compensate the owners of the cars.
This all stems from the fact that back in 2016, Tesla claimed that all its vehicles in production going forward have ‘all the hardware necessary for full self-driving capability'.
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Admittedly, the way the company has used the term ‘full self-driving' has changed over the years but at the time and years later, Musk claimed Tesla owners would eventually receive a software update that would turn their vehicles into 'robotaxis' capable of level-4-5 self-driving, which means unsupervised autonomous driving - even with no one in the cars.
However, almost ten years later, this doesn’t appear to be the case and isn’t expected to be anytime soon.
Back in 2022, a judge set a precedent by ordering Tesla to upgrade a customer’s self-driving computer for free so that they can subscribe to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving program without any additional cost.
Based on Tesla’s previous statement that all cars produced in 2016 will 'already have the necessary hardware for full self-driving capability,' the owners of those vehicles need to have all the hardware necessary to have access to these features.
In addition to this, in January this year, Musk admitted that that HW3 computers are not powerful enough to achieve unsupervised self-driving capability.
So, the judge’s actions ultimately benefits the individuals who own the 4 million Tesla vehicles in the world with HW3 computers.
And the act of replacing these computers will prove to be very costly for the company. The many Tesla models with the HW3 computer span multiple models from the Model 3 to the Model X.
Each replacement would require precise engineering to integrate new hardware and this would result in as much as $10 billion or more according to industry estimates reported by International Business Times.
If Tesla decided to compensate the owners rather than take on the mammoth task of replacing the hardware, it also comes with its own issues, namely determining fair payouts for owners, some of whom purchased FSD years ago.
In a worst-case scenario, failure to satisfyingly resolve this could result in further lawsuit and an erosion of brand trust.
UNILAD has contacted Tesla for comment.