Tesla: Autopilot HW3 upgrade still on track for Q1 production

The new hardware will bring a 1,000-percent increase in processing capability.

Tesla has reaffirmed its plan to begin building the third-generation Autopilot hardware in just a few months.

The HW3 upgrade promises to enable fully autonomous operation, but the company recently removed the pre-order option for full self-driving capability from the order pages for the Model 3, S and X.

Speaking to analysts following Tesla's Q3 earnings release, CEO Elon Musk clarified that the previous order system had been "creating a lot of friction" in the sales process because people did not understand the difference between Enhanced Autopilot and full self-driving. The option is still available, but only for those who ask.

Tesla's lead chip designer, Peter Bannon, said the team has already completed qualification of the hardware components and is now focusing on the manufacturing line.

"Cost, volume and power consumption are approximately the same as the current hardware, but it's a ten-fold improvement in frames per second," Musk added.

Tesla's director of AI, Andrej Karpathy, explained that the new computer will be capable of processing much more complex neural networks.

"It is a common finding in the industry, and we see this as well, that as you make the networks bigger by adding more neurons, the accuracy of all their predictions increases with the added capacity," he said. "So in other words, we are currently at a place where we trained large neural networks that work very well, but we are not able to deploy them to the fleet due to computational constraints."

In the near term, new neural network algorithms introduced with the Autopilot v9.0 software update will soon enable Navigate on Autopilot to automatically handle lane changes, forks and high-curvature exits.

Drivers will initially be required to confirm lane changes using the turn signal, but future versions will allow drivers to waive the confirmation requirement so the car can change lanes entirely by itself.

Musk said Tesla's cloud data shows automatic braking events "all the time," potentially saving pedestrians or other cars from impacts every day.