No big — a computer on wheels like Moore's law for PCs where hardware is typically not backward compatible but software usually is until it's no longer supported.
"Tesla simply didn't show up at the hearing so as not to legitimize the claim and was sentenced to pay them US$1,106 for the HW 3.0 swap."
That's literally not how small claims court works. If you don't show up, you legitimize the claim because you lose. Which means that everyone impacted should file in small claims. It's cheap, not that hard to do, and although in almost every case that I've heard of, the company settles the day before to avoid a default judgement. Of course, Musks routine is to keep a minimum staff in the legal department as far as forward thinking stuff goes. Like avoiding being sued.
And now for the rest of the story. Tesla brings back radar in this new module, which went unmentioned by the article. Which is a rather big omission. Since by re-including a feature that they dropped, they're admitting that the camera-only approach doesn't work well enough.
And by extension, that means that all prior buyers of FSD won't actually GET FSD. They'll have to trade in for a newer one. Or better still, get what you can for the Tesla before it loses any more value and get an EV that doesn't have a bunch of problems and promises that went unmet.
Having a self-driving computer can be a more efficient than without.. the power consumption of the computer is tiny compared to the potential driving behavior efficiency gain over time as vehicle to vehicle communications becomes widespread and useful.
The creative destructors from Munro Live have sussed Tesla's upcoming HW 4.0 computer that will do all the autonomous driving calculations in its new or upgraded models. Unfortunately, while the engineering talent at Munro found the new HW 4.0 design to be more efficient than before, that also means it can't be retrofitted to existing cars in a simple board swap.