Tesla still has not found a solution for millions of vehicles it promised FSD

Tesla still has not announced a clear upgrade plan for the millions of HW3-equipped vehicles it promised to drive fully autonomously years ago. Elon Musk pointed to next-generation AI hardware as the solution. See Full Size Tesla CEO Elon Musk brought up the discussions that have been going on for years about vehicles equipped with Hardware 3 (HW3) at the meeting where the company's 2026 second quarter financial results were announced.

Musk did not give a clear answer to investors' questions about whether there would be a hardware upgrade for these vehicles to run the new generation Full Self-Driving (FSD) software. This shows that Tesla still does not have a clear plan for HW3 vehicles. Asked if a hardware upgrade was planned for HW3 vehicles, Musk said it would "make sense" and "will become financially viable at some point.

But he made no commitments about when the upgrade would happen, what hardware would be used, or how Tesla would cover the cost of it. The most striking point in Musk's statements was that he pointed to the new generation artificial intelligence computer that is still under development, rather than a direct upgrade of HW3 vehicles to the Hardware 4 (AI4) platform. View Full Size Musk said that the company is working on an improved version of AI4 and that production of this hardware could start in the middle of next year.

In addition, he stated that they hope to put the more powerful AI5 platform into mass production next year. However, he stated that AI5 will initially be used in Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus. This statement shows that the solution HW3 owners are waiting for depends on hardware that is not yet in production.

Tesla started selling vehicles by saying that all vehicles produced since 2016 have all the necessary equipment for fully autonomous driving, and based on this statement, it offered customers the FSD package, whose price sometimes went up to 15 thousand dollars. However, Elon Musk later admitted that the HW3 hardware was not capable of reaching the level of unsupervised FSD. According to Musk, the memory bandwidth of HW3 is only one-eighth of Hardware 4. Even HW4 or AI4 hardware is not considered sufficient.

Because he claimed that the Cybercab model included an advanced AI4 hardware with more RAM. One of Tesla's biggest obstacles is the scale of the hardware upgrade. According to industry estimates, the company may need to replace computers in about 4 million vehicles or compensate vehicle owners to fulfill its promises.

In this process, the company started to offer FSD v14 Lite software with limited features instead of the full version for HW3 vehicles. Tesla has still not announced a clear upgrade plan for millions of HW3-equipped vehicles, for which it promised fully autonomous driving years ago."