Recently, Tesla officially announced that it has begun to push FSD V14 Lite (fully autonomous V14 lightweight version) to models equipped with Hardware 3 (HW3, also known as AI 3 internally at Tesla) hardware.
For the large number of HW3 car owners in China, will they be able to get this upgrade simultaneously in the future? Tesla China’s official website customer service replied that Tesla’s assisted driving function is currently only suitable for some models equipped with AI4 hardware (i.e. HW4).
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This means that although overseas HW3 models have begun to receive FSD V14 Lite updates, it has not yet been officially confirmed whether HW3 models in the Chinese market can simultaneously support related upgrades in the future.
It is reported that the installation package version pushed by FSD V14 Lite this time is 2026.20.5.1. Its core is not a simple deletion of functions, but the use of "Knowledge Distillation" technology, a complete V14 large model run by the HW4 platform, and then the driving capabilities are migrated to a small model specially retrained for HW3. After the upgrade is completed, HW3 models have added functions such as automatic parking, exiting parking spaces, and reversing that were previously only available on the HW4 platform. At the same time, they will further optimize strategies such as navigation decisions, merging with vehicles, and passing at intersections, improve experiences such as sudden braking and stiff steering, and support user-customized driving styles.
It is understood that the reason why this update has received widespread attention is that the HW3 platform has not had a major version upgrade for more than a year. In April this year, Musk publicly admitted for the first time during the first quarter earnings call that the memory bandwidth of HW3 was only one-eighth that of HW4 and could no longer support the operation of a complete "unsupervised version of FSD". This statement not only means that HW3 has "peaked" in terms of hardware capabilities, but also caused dissatisfaction among a large number of old car owners.