FSD v14.3.9 Is Telling Drivers to Clean a Camera That Is Already Clean

Tesla owners running Full Self-Driving (Supervised) v14.3.9 are being told their forward-facing camera needs cleaning when it does not. The car raises a warning demanding increased attention while FSD is engaged, and the service screen reports: "Poor camera visibility detected. Interior windshield residue cleaning is required."

The camera is fine. Not a Tesla App reports that Tesla has acknowledged the software bug, is telling affected owners not to book a service visit, and is proactively cancelling cleaning appointments already in the diary with a message saying the work is not required.

What is actually going wrong

The alert comes from the interior forward-facing camera mounted behind the windshield — the one that looks out through the glass rather than any of the exterior units. According to Not a Tesla App, an overly aggressive vision encoder in this build is reading ordinary optical conditions, including minor sun glare, as a dirty lens.

The thing the detector is meant to catch is real: a hazy film builds up on the inside of the windshield and within the camera enclosure as cabin plastics off-gas, and it does degrade what the camera sees. Tesla introduced the detection and a free 15-minute cleaning appointment with FSD v14.1.7 in November 2025, and has been patenting camera housings designed to manage that off-gassing. The detector is not spurious. Its threshold in this build is.

Scale, and what we do not know

Reports come from drivers across the fleet rather than isolated cars, and so far are confined to v14.3.9. Nobody has published a number, so treat this as a widely reported fault rather than a quantified one, and Tesla has said nothing publicly beyond what affected owners are told directly.

Why v14.3.10 does not settle it

FSD v14.3.10 began rolling out on 19 September in firmware 2026.27.10 and would be the obvious vehicle for a fix. But all seventeen of its release-note bullets are a verbatim reprint of v14.3.9's — the same notes that shipped with v14.3.9 itself.

This is what that habit costs. Notes carried forward unchanged stop working as a record of what changed, so an owner cannot tell whether the build they just received addresses the fault they are living with. Whether v14.3.10 corrects the camera threshold is, at the time of writing, unknown.

Which cars are actually exposed in Europe

Almost none, because of the branch split. The 14.3 line is three rollouts on three continents and Europe is not on it: European cars run firmware 2026.27.300 carrying FSD 14.2.2.6, released 15 September at about 1.5% of the fleet — the successor to the build that shipped the EU recall remedy.

Australia and New Zealand are the ones to watch. Their current branch is firmware 2026.28.5, and it carries v14.3.9 — the affected version. Owners there are on the build this fault belongs to, while North America has at least been offered a successor.

For Czech owners, who only gained legal access to FSD Supervised on 21 September, the practical answer is that the version they are switching on is not the one throwing these alerts.

What to do if your car asks

Do not book the cleaning; if an appointment is already booked, expect Tesla to cancel it. The alert also asks for increased attention while FSD is engaged, and that part deserves honouring regardless of its cause — supervision is the driver's obligation on a Level 2 system whether or not the prompt was justified.

The wider cost is to the alert itself. A warning that cries wolf teaches owners to dismiss it, and the next one may be about a camera that genuinely cannot see.