Tesla bringing FSD reverse to HW3 vehicles and may lower insurance premiums for autonomous driving

Elon Musk is on record promising that Tesla will upgrade all HW3 computers in its older cars for free if it can't make them run its latest FSD 13 update in the unsupervised manner promised for later this year, and he has now tipped an important step toward that goal.

Tesla cars with an older Hardware 3.0 set of computers and cameras, i.e. most Tesla vehicles, will soon be able to reverse into a parking spot just like HW4 vehicles running FSD 13 are already able to. The reverse path even shows in the FSD screen visualizations now, so the feature release is a matter of time

The ability to reverse on FSD has been conspicuously missing from older Teslas with HW3 computers, and Elon joked that this situation must be very stressing for the AI in his electric cars.

As the state of reversing on HW3 cars stands now, the Tesla can drive on FSD and even position itself before a parking spot, but the driver would have to manually shift into reverse. This adds to the FSD disengagement numbers, and Tesla needs to improve those statistics for regulatory purposes, if it wants to release unsupervised FSD this year, or the Robotaxi next year, as promised.

Still, Tesla is so certain that it has cracked the code of autonomous driving, that Elon Musk recently advised that FSD will become statistically safer than a human driver in the next three months. While Elon is known to stretch deadlines, Tesla is internally preparing for that moment by potentially lowering insurance premiums for owners who drive more on FSD.

A code decompile of Tesla's iPhone app has returned strings that refer to an upcoming update to the Safety Score feature. Right now, it simply shows the miles driven on FSD or Autopilot, but in the future, Safety Score will reportedly be calculating those in ratios and percentages.

A higher Safety Score given to Tesla owners who let FSD do their bidding a larger percentage of the time instead of driving manually will potentially result in lowering their insurance premiums.

For the time being, this would only go to Tesla's own insurance offered directly through the app, and only available in several states, but it may be a harbinger of things to come if regulators get acquainted with the data, and certify Elon's claim that the FSD system will be safer than human drivers indeed.

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