Tesla will have to replace HW3 computers with the newer, HW4 version, for Tesla owners who purchased the company's Full Self-Driving (FSD) package.
The news comes from CEO Elon Musk, who finally admitted it during Wednesday's Tesla earnings call (via Electrek). "The truth is that we will need to replace all HW3 computers in vehicles where FSD was purchased," said Musk after Tesla's head of FSD, Ashok Elluswamy, said the company is "not giving up on it."
For years, Musk claimed that Tesla cars with HW3 hardware are future-proof, meaning they'll be capable of running FSD once it truly becomes what Musk wants it to be: a feature package offering unsupervised, autonomous driving in Tesla cars.
This likely prompted many owners to dish out the money for FSD, which is not an insignificant amount (Tesla added a $99 per month FSD subscription option last year). The pricing for FSD changed over the years, but it currently stands at $8,000 in the U.S.
Tesla started shipping cars with HW3 in April 2019, and HW4 came in January 2023 (later for some models). This means that all Tesla cars sold from mid-2019 to early 2023 have HW3 installed; all owners of such vehicles that purchased the FSD package will need to have the HW3 computers replaced with HW4 to enjoy its full benefits.
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This is going to be a monumental task for Tesla. "We are going to have to upgrade Hardware 3 for people who bought FSD. That’s the honest answer. It's going to be painful and difficult but that’s what we're going to have to do," Musk said during the call.
Tesla already had to do this once, albeit on a smaller scale. In 2019, the company started replacing the older, HW2.5 computer with HW3 for owners who purchased the FSD package.
As Electrek noted, this might not sit well with Tesla owners who did not purchase FSD, as Musk claimed (repeatedly, for years), that all cars since 2016 are capable of Full Self-Driving. The company already lost one court case over a HW3 retrofit, with the judge calling out Tesla for "false advertising."
During the call Musk also promised that Tesla will launch a paid robotaxi service in Austin, Texas. This will require the unsupervised version of FSD, which hasn't been released yet. As it stands, FSD is still a set of features which give Tesla cars some partial autonomy, but does not enable the cars to drive themselves without user supervision.
