Elon Musk Admits Tesla Has No Plan to Upgrade HW3 Cars for FSD
Buying full autonomous driving years ago turned out to be a classic silicon promise. Elon Musk confessed during an earnings call that Tesla still lacks any concrete hardware upgrade roadmap for older cars.
During the Q2 earnings call, Elon Musk dodged direct questions about whether Tesla will actually retrofit cars equipped with Hardware 3. Analyst Will Stein pressed for a clear timeline on handling FSD v15 updates on older boards, receiving only vague hand-waving about theoretical future chip generations.
The technical reality is fairly grim because the aging HW3 architecture operates with one-eighth of the memory bandwidth found in HW4 units. To keep drivers quiet, the EV maker quietly shipped a stripped-down FSD v14 Lite patch that basically confirms the hardware gap rather than solving it.
Instead of fixing existing vehicles, management suggested waiting for AI5 chips, which are currently prioritizing the Optimus humanoid robot before seeing any automotive deployment. Meanwhile, the company quietly altered its all cars have full self-driving hardware website promise while facing growing class-action lawsuits across the globe.
Replacing computer modules across roughly four million sold vehicles represents a logistical nightmare that previously sparked wild ideas about building dedicated micro-factories. Recent patents even suggest desperate attempts to cram high-precision AI models onto 8-bit chips using mathematical trickery.
The grand vision of overnight software upgrades slowly dissolves into expensive hardware reality and legal courtroom battles. Millions of early adopters are left holding the bill for an unfulfilled promise of robotaxi glory.
Source: Electrek
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