Old Tesla vehicles will most likely be retrofitted with the company’s new and more powerful self-driving chip for free later this year, this according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk. He gave this timeline in response to a query on Twitter about when the company was planning to upgrade existing models to the newer chip.
“End of Q4, most likely,” came the response from Musk. Tesla says that the new full self-driving chip is the first that the company has designed in house. It also claims that it provides 21 times the performance of the NVIDIA chips that it replaces.
Tesla has been shipping this new chip in its Model S, Model X, and Model 3 vehicles and will now be offering it as an upgrade to over half a million customers who have the older chips. Musk has previously claimed that this chip is capable enough of full self-driving and that it will be able to do just that when the software finally catches up to it.
The upgraded full self-driving computer on Tesla vehicles actually have two of these new chips as a redundancy. Even though they’re a lot more powerful than the NVIDIA chips they replace, Tesla says that they still cost 20 percent less than NVIDIA’s hardware with only a slightly higher power appetite. Any Tesla owner who paid for the company’s full self-driving add-on package will receive this upgrade for free.