AUSTIN, Texas — Tesla's effort to bring its newest self-driving software to older vehicles is officially going global. As announced through the company's official Korea channel and detailed on July 10, Full Self-Driving (Supervised) v14 Lite has made its first stop outside the United States, reaching owners of Hardware 3 vehicles in South Korea.
South Korea Leads the Way
The choice of market is itself a small surprise. Canada usually receives Tesla software features right after the United States, but this time South Korea is the launchpad for FSD v14 Lite's international push. The initial release targets early-access testers with U.S.-built Model 3 and Model Y vehicles running the older AI3 computer, and Tesla has said the update will expand more broadly to all eligible AI3 owners in Korea after further validation.
South Korea was also the first country outside North America to receive the main FSD v14 branch last year, so the market has become something of a proving ground for Tesla's autonomy ambitions abroad. Getting the latest capabilities onto older hardware there is a meaningful vote of confidence for long-time owners.
A Real Engineering Feat
What makes this notable is the hardware gap Tesla had to bridge. FSD v14 Lite is the first FSD build released for AI3 cars in roughly 14 months, and it is a distilled version of the main v14 branch that runs on newer AI4 vehicles. Elon Musk has noted that AI3 computers have only about 15 percent of AI4's memory bandwidth, which makes squeezing modern self-driving software onto them a serious optimization challenge.
