Tesla's cars contain far more compute than any other carmaker's cars.

Judge as of 2024-01-24 on onboard inference compute in production vehicles that customers can buy. True: Tesla's production vehicles (HW3/HW4) had substantially more onboard compute (e.g. TOPS) than any other carmaker's production vehicles, and Tesla's total fleet compute also led by a wide margin. Mostly true: Tesla led per vehicle by a clear but modest margin, or one niche competitor's car came close. Mixed: Tesla led by far in total fleet compute (because of fleet size), but some competitors' individual production cars (e.g. Chinese EVs with multiple NVIDIA Orin chips) matched or exceeded Tesla's per-vehicle compute. Mostly false: Tesla was among the leaders but not first on either measure. False: several carmakers' production vehicles and fleets clearly exceeded Tesla's compute on both measures.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Revving Up the Future of Transportation: NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion Takes the Wheel at Auto Shanghai NVIDIA Blog · 19 April 2023

   “All these vehicles run on its proprietary Adam supercomputer, which is powered by four NVIDIA DRIVE Orin SoCs. This quad configuration delivers 1,016 TOPS of performance to enable advanced driver-assistance systems and a point-to-point autonomous driving experience.”

2. E2 The Advanced Driving Assist System (ADAS) Pissing Contest In China Is Huge And Complicated So Here Is Your Comprehensive Guide And Ranking - The Autopian The Autopian · 22 July 2022

   “The ADAS is powered by a 254 TOPS NVIDIA Orin-X chip.”

3. E3 The Advanced Driving Assist System (ADAS) Pissing Contest In China Is Huge And Complicated So Here Is Your Comprehensive Guide And Ranking - The Autopian The Autopian · 22 July 2022

   “Instead of going for top TOPS, they went for the 30 TOPS Nvidia Jetson Xavier.”

4. E4 Tesla Autopilot hardware - Wikipedia Wikipedia · 14 June 2024 Own record

   “Musk stated that HW4 computational capabilities are three to eight times more powerful than HW3.”

5. E5 The Advanced Driving Assist System (ADAS) Pissing Contest In China Is Huge And Complicated So Here Is Your Comprehensive Guide And Ranking - The Autopian The Autopian · 22 July 2022

   “Computing power comes from four (!) NVIDIA Orin-X chips with a total output of 1,016 TOPS.”

6. E6 The Advanced Driving Assist System (ADAS) Pissing Contest In China Is Huge And Complicated So Here Is Your Comprehensive Guide And Ranking - The Autopian The Autopian · 22 July 2022

   “The data is crunched by a Huawei MDC 810 400 TOPS chip.”

7. E7 The Advanced Driving Assist System (ADAS) Pissing Contest In China Is Huge And Complicated So Here Is Your Comprehensive Guide And Ranking - The Autopian The Autopian · 22 July 2022

   “The ADAS is powered by a 254 TOPS NVIDIA Orin-X chip.”

8. E8 Tesla AI Capacity Expansion – H100, Dojo D1, D2, HW 4.0, X.AI, Cloud Service Provider SemiAnalysis · 27 June 2023

   “With three NPUs per chip running at 2.2 GHz frequency, the total compute power is 121.651 trillion operations per second (TOPS).”

9. E9 China Passenger Car Navigate on Autopilot (NOA) Industry Report, 2023 ResearchInChina

   “packs 11 HD cameras (including 7 8MP cameras), 12 ultrasonic radars, 5 radars, and dual Orin-X SoCs (AI compute: 508 TOPS)”

10. E10 Under-the-radar Chinese EV maker launches 1st model to take on Li Auto's Li L8 CnEVPost · 23 August 2023

    “an advanced version with dual Orin-X chips, one roof LiDAR, two side LiDARs, 12 cameras, five millimeter-wave radars, and 12 ultrasonic sensors.”

The evidence shows competitor vehicle setups of 400–1,016 TOPS (E1, E6, E7) and a Tesla figure of about 121.65 TOPS per chip (E10). It does not say how many chips a Tesla carries, so Tesla's per-vehicle compute is not established. No evidence item covers total fleet compute, which the criteria need in order to separate mixed from mostly false or false.