It’s taken years, but Tesla has finally brought its latest FSD (Supervised) V12.3.4 to legacy Model S/X owners still on the road. A 2016 Model X owner just now receiving the highly anticipated FSD v12.3.4 update – and floored by Tesla’s foresight.
“What were the Autopilot engineers at Tesla doing back in 2016?” a Model X owner marveled after his 8-year-old EV downloaded the bleeding-edge FSD software. “They must have been laying the groundwork even then for updates like this years later.”
It’s an astounding display of forward-thinking by Tesla. While other automakers are struggling to provide over-the-air updates to cars just a few years old due to sourcing different hardware and software piecemeal, Tesla took an extraordinarily unified approach from the start.
“Tesla basically had just 2-3 core vehicle platforms to worry about from the beginning,” explained one industry blogger. “Other carmakers ended up with 20-30 different driver assist systems to juggle between vendors, which is a nightmare for future updates.”
For now, FSD v12 rollout is limited to North American and Canada owners only.
But still, the fact that Tesla could deploy such an ambitious update at all to 8-year-old EVs is a testament to the company’s long game on autonomous driving. Other automakers are playing catch-up to that level of fleet-wide, future-proof planning.