Community Team Successfully Upgrades Tesla HW3 to HW4

On August 16, tech enthusiast Michal Gapinski announced on X that his team had successfully upgraded a 2022 Model 3 (equipped with HW3 hardware) to HW4. The modification involved replacing the Autopilot computer, performing minor ECU modifications, and using adapters to maintain compatibility with the original camera wiring—though all cameras had to be replaced with 5-megapixel units (up from HW3’s original 1.2-megapixel cameras). The vehicle remains fully drivable post-upgrade, and the first camera is already operational. Earlier this year, during Tesla’s April earnings call, CEO Elon Musk acknowledged that HW3’s memory bandwidth—48 GB/s—is only one-eighth that of HW4 (384 GB/s), making it incapable of supporting the unsupervised version of Full Self-Driving (FSD). Musk pledged to offer FSD purchasers either a hardware upgrade or a trade-in discount toward a new vehicle, with plans to establish “micro-factories” in major cities to carry out these retrofits. However, as of now, Tesla has not released a specific timeline for these upgrades. Since June, Tesla has been rolling out a feature-limited version of FSD, dubbed FSD V14 Lite, to HW3 vehicles, while the full-featured FSD remains exclusive to HW4-equipped cars. Overseas analysts estimate that if Tesla launches an official paid retrofit program, the cost could range between $3,000 and $5,000.