The older HW3-equipped Tesla models will probably not support any promised Full Self Driving capabilities.
In a new twist in the never-ending Tesla drama, it appears as if many customers who paid extra for Teslas that could drive themselves may never get that feature. This was revealed during Tesla’s Q&A session following the Q3 2024 financial results.
Back in 2016, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that all future vehicles by the company would have the necessary hardware to carry out level 5 self-driving. This implies full autonomous driving under any conditions. Later, he realised that the hardware would not be up to the task, so those who paid for the ‘Full Self Driving‘ (FSD) package were upgraded with the new ‘self driving computer’, labelled Hardware 3 or HW3. This was around 2019, and the company has since equipped some newer vehicles with Hardware 4 (HW4), which includes better cameras and chips with loads more processing power.
Now, it appears that HW3 may have been insufficient to deliver FSD and retrofitting HW4 into existing HW3 Teslas is ‘economically unfeasible’, leaving many existing owners of older Tesla vehicles feeling betrayed. When asked if HW3 about the promised unsupervised self-driving on HW3 vehicles, here is what Elon Musk had to say:
“We are not 100% sure. HW4 has several times the capability of HW3. It’s easier to get things to work on HW4 and it takes a lot of efforts to squeeze that into HW3. There is some chance that HW3 does not achieve the safety level that allows for unsupervised FSD.”
He was also asked what Tesla would do if they could not deliver FSD to HW3 vehicles, as many owners have already paid for the package.
“If that turns out to be the case, we will upgrade those who bought HW3 FSD for free. And we have designed the system to be upgradable.”
Publication Elektrek has been tracking Elon’s promised FSD roadmap for years and you can find their analysis of the situation here and reported on this latest admission by Elon. According to their analysis, HW4 would have to be redesigned to be retrofitted to Teslas with HW3 equipped.
