If you bought a Tesla from before 2023 in the hopes that a future software upgrade would render it capable of unsupervised full self-driving—the as-yet unrealized dream of a truly self driving car, in other words—that’s never going to happen, Elon Musk admitted on an earnings call Wednesday.
It’s possible you might be able to get a hardware upgrade, rather than having to trade in your Tesla for a new one, but from the sound of it, retrofitting hundreds of thousands of cars with new computers and cameras is going to be a colossal new project for Tesla.
The FSD hardware packaged known as Hardware 3 was standard until Hardware 4 came along in early 2023, though it took until May of that year for Hardware 4 to reach all models. (To tell which version you have, go to Settings in your infotainment system, then tap Software, and then Additional Vehicle Information).
“Unfortunately, Hardware 3, I wish it were otherwise, but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD,” Musk said during the call on Wednesday. “We did think at one point it would, but relative to Hardware 4 it has only 1/8 the memory bandwidth of Hardware 4.”
Some customers have voiced frustration about Tesla not delivering FSD, and Tesla faces a class action lawsuit in Australia alleging that “Despite statements or representations to the contrary, the hardware on Tesla vehicles is incapable of supporting fully autonomous or close to autonomous driving.”
Seemingly in an effort to stave off a customer revolt over the revelation that the Hardware 3 package will never be capable of unsupervised driving, Musk has described the following program:
“For customers that have bought FSD, what we’re offering is essentially a trade-in, like a discounted trade-in, for cars that have AI4 hardware. And we’ll also be offering the ability to upgrade the car to replace the computer.”
He also threw in this curveball:
“And you also need to replace the cameras, unfortunately, to go to Hardware 4.”
In other words, your car has to be retrofit with multiple new parts in order to even stand a chance of ever receiving a software upgrade that enables Tesla’s unsupervised self-driving mode.
Musk claimed on the call that Tesla plans to create “micro-factories, or small factories,” concentrated in population centers, where “many production lines” will change out the hardware. Relying on local service centers, where mechanics would intersperse this hardware upgrade with their other tasks, would be “extremely slow,” he said.
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