[Rohansi]

The difference between HW4 and older Teslas (before 2023) is night and day. HW4 absolutely can handle 99.9% or more of driving now whereas the older models drive like an idiot. I've never had to intervene on HW4 yet. It did well avoiding debris and animals, even seeing them heading towards the road. Worked well in heavy rain and snowstorms, even when lanes were barely visible. Handled moving and parked emergency vehicles with lights on correctly. Navigated through roads undergoing work (lanes shifted, closed off, pylons everywhere). Automatic parking actually works but not all the time yet.

No software update is going to give working FSD to all those older models on the road. I don't think they can even have HW4 retrofitted either. Ideally FSD would be disabled on those cars because it's confirmed never going to work properly but people paid for lifetime FSD on them (newer cars are subscription only).

[senordevnyc]

Even if 99.9% is true (and there’s no reason to think it is), that’s nowhere near reliable enough to match Waymo or do truly autonomous driving. The average human is much better than 99.9%.

[Rohansi]

That's just me being pessimistic because I've seen how terrible FSD is on older Teslas, and only have personal experience using it in HW4 for ~2 months.

It's really unfortunate that FSD is judged as a singular feature when it is vastly different depending on the car. HW3 cars are getting cut down versions of FSD software, which is useless garbage because it drives like an idiot. HW2 and earlier are probably not getting FSD updates at all anymore. The majority of Teslas on the road are HW3 or earlier, run significantly worse (unsafe) FSD versions, and yet Tesla still allows it to be turned on.