Tesla's Hardware 4.0 May Be Capable of Bird's Eye View Feature

Will Tesla add a bird's eye view feature to newer vehicles?

@zzapcars

Tesla’s forthcoming hardware 4.0 computer reveals that Tesla will be able to connect up 12 cameras with its new FSD hardware suite, up from the current nine it uses today.

Earlier this week, Tesla owner and hacker Greentheonly leaked information and pictures of Tesla’s anticipated hardware 4.0. Green confirmed some big and subtle improvements to the hardware.

12 Cameras in Hardware 4

The new hardware's main board will accept up to 12 cameras, with one of them labeled as a spare. Tesla currently uses nine cameras in its current hardware and is expected to reduce the front-facing cameras by one. Based on this information and the labels on the camera connectors, it appears that Tesla will include three additional cameras with FSD hardware 4.0.

When Greentheonly revealed these hardware 4 details, Twitter user StayLameBro1 inquired about where the new cameras will be placed around the vehicle. “There are seemingly 3 bumper cameras,” Green responds. “One up front the other two are left and right so in the corners somewhere.”

Green adds that the addition of bumper cameras and HD radar will remove blind spots. This is a big deal alone. Lastly, Green added that these additional cameras could allow Tesla to incorporate a real bird’s eye view into its vehicles, a feature many Tesla owners have been requesting.

There's currently a large blind spot in front of the vehicle

Munro

Bird’s Eye View

Bird's eye view is a feature that many other automakers have had for a while now, including Toyota, Honda, BMW, and Lucid. It allows for drivers to see a top-down view of their vehicle and surroundings, increasing safety and spatial awareness.

Last fall, Tesla announced they’re transitioning their fleet to their own Tesla Vision. The company added that vehicles built in October 2022 and beyond would no longer include ultrasonic sensors (USS). This sent confusion around the Tesla community given the blind spots, but hardware 4 will seemingly address these concerns.

The removal of the USS saves Tesla approximately $114 per vehicle. This is in line with “Project Highland,” a cost-cutting project for the upcoming revamped Model 3.

No Retrofits for Hardware 4

One big improvement that’s coming to hardware 4 are upgraded cameras. Currently, Tesla uses cameras with 1.2-megapixels. Hardware 4 is expected to ship with 5-megapixel cameras. However, Tesla owners on hardware 3 will not be able to retrofit their vehicles.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk told investors that upgrading hardware 3 to hardware 4 is difficult and expensive.

“The cost and difficulty of retrofitting hardware 3 with hardware 4 is quite significant,” Musk said. “So, it would not be, I think, economically feasible to do so.”

After the leak of hardware 4, we now begin to understand Musk's statement. We're not only talking about a new computer with hardware 4, but higher-resolution cameras, additional cameras, possibly a new bumper design and an HD radar unit.

Musk has also reiterated that hardware 3 will be capable of driving safer than a human, however, it's not clear under which constraints that would be, such as specific roads and weather conditions, or whether a human driver would always be required to be attentive.

Update: We have now confirmed that FSD Hardware 4.0 will not include additional cameras in the bumper or elsewhere, which means that the vehicle will still have a blind spot. However, we have been told that the 'bumper' camera connectors on HW4.0 are for future expansion, but will not be used initially.

New 'Wile E. Coyote' Wall Video Puts Tesla's FSD V13 to the Test

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Last week, Mark Ruber, an engineering YouTuber best known for his glitter bombs, released a video where he tested Tesla's Autopilot against various conditions - including the iconic ACME painted wall.

During this test, many people noted that Mark was using Autopilot rather than FSD, even though his video was titled “Can you Fool a Self-Driving Car?”. The Tesla on Autopilot went up against a vehicle equipped with Luminar’s LIDAR rig, running some sort of basic autonomy or safety software.

New Video Tests FSD

Many people were disappointed with Mark’s video and his testing methods, so several creators got to work to actually test out Tesla’s FSD.

Creator Kyle Paul over on X made a much better follow-up video, using both a HW3 Model Y as well as an AI4 Cybertruck. In a relatively unsurprising turn of events, the Cybertruck was successfully able to detect the wall, slowed down, and came to a stop. The Cybertruck was running FSD 13.2.8.

Kyle’s team did a fantastic job building the wall and testing this in a private area using FSD rather than Autopilot. On top of that - they re-tested the results several times and recorded the entire thing in and out. While Mark’s video was more for entertainment, Kyle really set out to prove what would really happen in this unlikely scenario.

Sadly, the HW3 Model Y was unable to detect the wall, and manual intervention was required in each test. While the Model Y was running FSD 12.5.4.2 rather than an FSD V12.6 build, we don’t expect this to have had a significant impact on the test - this is more of an issue with how computer vision analyzes the environment.

There are several major differences between HW3 and HW4. The first is obviously that the version that runs on AI4 is more advanced, as the hardware is capable of processing a lot more data. However, AI4 also features much higher-resolution cameras than HW3, and Tesla recently added the ability for the video feeds to be processed at full resolution on FSD V13. This could have made the difference, although it’s not entirely clear. Perhaps if HW3 gets a version of FSD V13 in the future, HW3 can be retested to see if it passes the “ACME wall” test.

Watch

Kyle’s entire video is below. It’s only 10 minutes long, so definitely give it a watch. Props to Kyle on the quick and thorough execution.

What Does This Mean for FSD?

We broke down Mark’s test - and examined all the little issues that we discovered after doing some in-depth research - you can read our analysis here. 

Putting aside the issues with Mark’s testing and instead using the new results - it seems that if you were to have to fight against Wile-E-Coyote and his ACME tools with your Tesla, cartoon logic may win if you’re on an HW3 vehicle. If you’re on an AI4 vehicle, you’ll likely come to a safe stop.

Vehicle depth perception is definitely something that Tesla has been hard at work to improve - and some fairly drastic improvements came with FSD V13 that haven’t been entirely translated to FSD V12 just yet. Future versions of HW3 FSD may be able to determine that the wall is there successfully. So Kyle - if you’re reading this - don’t get rid of that wall. We’d love to see more testing in the future.

However, this entire test scenario is so out of left field… there is a good likelihood this same test would fool some human drivers as well. The most important part is that the future of autonomy will not fall for these tricks, so it's very unlikely for someone to weaponize this idea as it’d only possibly work on a small segment of vehicles.

If Wile-E-Coyote is after you, someone else may drive into the wall before your Tesla does.

Not a Tesla App

We’re not kidding, this really happened already. This isn’t a realistic scenario outside of someone trying to play an insane prank - but it’s good to know that FSD V13 is capable of dodging this.

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Tesla Hosts Public All-Hands Meeting for Q1 2025 - Recap & Replay

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Tesla regularly holds quarterly all-hands meetings for employees, but last night marks the first time Tesla has live-streamed the event for the public.

The meeting primarily focused on Tesla’s employees, recent achievements, and the future of Tesla. While it didn’t reveal much new information, it was interesting to see Elon Musk candidly engaging with his teams, who seem to genuinely enjoy working with him. Still, there were a few noteworthy takeaways.

As with Tesla’s Earnings Calls and other live events, we’ve put together a concise, easy-to-digest recap of everything discussed.

General Points

• Work-related Injuries declined over time

• Planning to expand to new markets

• Cell Manufacturing

  • Continuing to invest in battery supply

  • Cheapest, lowest cost per kWh cell

• The supercharger network continues to grow

  • Vehicle range and charging speed should match the needs of humans and their required time for breaks

  • V4 Cabinets, 500 kW for Cybertruck, 1.2MW for Semi

• Tesla is building sustainable abundance

  • Autonomy is key for this to happen

  • Optimus and AI compute

  • This appears to be part of Elon’s new mission for Tesla, but it isn’t in the company’s updated mission statement just yet.

• Service and Collision Expansion will continue, with a big focus on Service

  • Service is what will sell future vehicles

• Interesting opportunity to make an electric, supersonic jet

  • Elon is stretched too thin but believes Tesla has all the tech in-house to do it

• Tesla is in Master Plan Phase III - making all energy on Earth sustainable / abundance for all

Tesla’s Achievements

• Sold 7 million vehicles globally

  • From just 20 in their first year of production

  • 10 million by next year

  • 3 million vehicles a year

• Giga Berlin has produced 660,000 drive units

• Giga Shanghai has built 3m cars

• Giga New York has produced 160,000 NACS adapters

• GIga Nevada has built 11,000 battery packs in a year

• Semi Factory on track for completion

  • Over a million, millions possibly

  • Will be autonomous in the future

• Stationary Battery Storage is a gigantic plus

  • Shanghai Megafactory is up and running

  • More Megapacks and Powerwalls are being produced than ever

• Switchover to New Model Y in a short period was an amazing feat of supply chain engineering

Optimus

• Optimus Production Line in Fremont is up and running

  • The first Optimus came off the production line this year

  • Pilot production this year

  • 22 DoF hand and forearm are now in production

• Real brain behind Optimus, not on the cloud and not pre-programmed

• What’s learned from cars (batteries, electronics, design, manufacturing, FSD) transferred to Optimus

• Biggest product of all time

  • 5,000 units by the end of the year, 10,000 at max

  • 50,000 next year

  • Middle of next year for outside of controlled environments

  • Will be available late 2026 for employees - who will get first dibs on access to Optimus

• Tesla will expand Optimus production to Giga Texas as well

Cybercab and FSD

• The Cybercab line will be fully autonomous

  • The aim is 5 seconds between producing cars

  • 50,000-ton gigacasting machine - make five castings at a time

    • Currently 9,000-ton machines

    • Seems to be an interesting engineering challenge

• Progress towards FSD (Unsupervised)

  • Cars doing useful work with no one in them (end-of-line to outbound lot)

  • Just started at Giga Texas

  • FSD will be 10x safer than humans

• Autopilot Hardware 4 / AI 4

  • Nothing better on the market than AI4 right now

  • No point in waiting for AI5 or AI6 as Tesla will continue producing new versions. There will be an AI 7, 8, etc.

• Autonomous Teslas will be everywhere

  • In 5 years, regulatory approval globally

  • Even without Cybercab, there is a gigantic fleet that can be autonomous

Cortex and Dojo

• Cortex - AI Training

  • One of the most powerful

  • 50,000 active GPUs

  • 100,000 GPUs coming soon

• Dojo now active in Giga New York and Palo Alto

  • Now actively working, doing about 5%-10% of the training load

Watch

You can watch a replay of the entire event below. The live stream starts shortly after the 28-minute mark.

Q1 2025 | Tesla All-Hands Livestream https://t.co/BqvjcLQo9H

— Tesla (@Tesla) March 21, 2025

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