Remember Tesla's self-driving chip? The retrofit plan for old models has been launched

Tesla is beginning to retrofit the Autopilot 2.0/2.5 systems in older Model S and Model X vehicles with the new Full Self-Driving Computer, which will be a massive retrofit program. 

Earlier this year, Tesla unveiled its fully autonomous driving chip, claiming it is "objectively the best chip in the world."

Compared to the previous generation of Tesla Autopilot hardware (which was provided by Nvidia), they claim a 21x improvement in frames per second processing performance.

According to the company, its new computer can process 2,300 frames per second and perform 144 trillion operations per second.

CEO Elon Musk believes the fully autonomous chip will enable them to power the vision-based software for a fully self-driving feature to be released next year.

Tesla says all new Model S and Model X vehicles since March (starting around March 20) and all new Model 3 vehicles since April (starting around April 12) have the new Autopilot computer.

But Tesla is also promising new retrofits for Tesla owners who buy Tesla's Full Self-Driving Package with Autopilot 2.0 and 2.5.

Musk said the following about plans to offer the retrofit (FSD stands for 'Full Self-Driving'):

"People who purchase Full Self-Driving will get the FSD computer upgrade for free. This is the only change between Autopilot HW2.5 and HW3. Going forward "HW3" will be referred to as the FSD computer, which is accurate. No changes to vehicle sensors or wiring harnesses are required. This is very important."

The new computer has been in all new Tesla cars since April, but we haven't heard about any retrofit plans.

We have learned that Tesla has now temporarily launched a transformation plan:

But Tesla owners shouldn't expect to get a new FSD computer anytime soon.

Technically, there are probably hundreds of thousands of vehicles that qualify for a retrofit.

At this time, it looks like Tesla is only beginning to retrofit the Model S and Model X vehicles that are already in the "Group 1" that are scheduled to be put into service.

Automakers are trying to limit the cost of retrofits by limiting them to vehicles that already have working parts. As production and availability of fully self-driving chips increase, we expect Tesla to expand the program.