Tesla admits HW3 owners need upgrades for true 'Full Self-Driving'

4/22/2026 at 11:36:47 PM

"7 years ago, Musk said HW3 Teslas had "all the hardware necessary, compute and otherwise, for Full Self-Driving. He repeated this for years."

https://x.com/RealDanODowd/status/2047076407705264227?

by doener

4/22/2026 at 11:53:25 PM

Almost everything Musk says is either an outright lie or wildly optimistic to the point of lying.

FSD has been a year or two away every year since 2015.

There was going to be a voyage to Mars by 2024.

Funding was secured to take Tesla private at $420 a share.

He was going to save multiple trillions of dollars with DOGE.

There would be "close to zero new cases" of Covid by April 2020.

These are all off the top of my head, I'm sure we could list dozens more of these types of claims.

Nobody should be surprised when Elon lies, the real question is why does the media or anyone else continue to give anything he says any air of legitimacy at all given his track record of claims vs reality?

SpaceX (minus his Mars claims, which he has been clearly backtracking on for the past year or so) is the only one of his enterprises that isn't almost entirely hype and vibes based at this point, and from everything I've read it is because they uniquely understand how to mitigate the damage caused by his persistent manic overreach.

by bayarearefugee

4/23/2026 at 12:14:15 AM

And somehow he’s worth $655B. Pays to lie I guess haha.

by adityamwagh

4/23/2026 at 1:57:20 AM

Lying is a competitive advantage, yes. Why do you think companies have marketing budgets?

by yifanl

4/23/2026 at 12:11:58 PM

Didn't Musk famously shutter Tesla's marketing department two years ago, nearly to the day?[1] It seems it's quite possible to lie effectively, repeatedly, and pervasively even without a marking department. Maybe Musk is just that good.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-22/tesla-cut...

by voxadam

4/23/2026 at 6:34:13 PM

The army of YouTube stock pumpers didn't appear spontaneously. There's a budget for that.

by Zigurd

4/23/2026 at 4:45:44 PM

They shuttered a marketing department -- the Content Growth team -- and Tesla still has marketing teams around the world.

by stonogo

4/23/2026 at 2:08:40 AM

Let's not forget by 2023, all the Tesla owners making money as they sleep with their cars doubling as Robotaxis. Elon: "At that point it would be financially irresponsible not to own a Tesla".

by FireBeyond

4/23/2026 at 12:00:41 AM

And of course there was the entire Thai Cave rescue, and the utter nuisance he made of himself.

by EA-3167

4/23/2026 at 12:57:14 AM

Before that he said he pay to filter everyone's water in Flint if it tested bad. I think he donated a few filtered water foubtains instead.

by cma

4/23/2026 at 9:36:04 AM

Which I think is the basis for a claim being prepared in The Netherlands. People buying a Tesla, spending extra for FSD and are now, years later, presented with this "admission".

by fnoff

4/23/2026 at 6:04:02 PM

He said he can send a Tesla from a car park in New York to a car park in California, and he "this is something we can do today".

by ekjhgkejhgk

4/23/2026 at 1:54:34 AM

How is this huckster not in prison?

by vrganj

4/23/2026 at 7:42:39 PM

Laws are for the poors

by DerArzt

4/23/2026 at 1:36:07 AM

Elon Reeve Musk a liar?!? No! Say it ain't so!

by ulfw

4/23/2026 at 1:05:18 AM

Still don't understand how they got away selling this Full Scam of the Decade™ from Oct 2016 (Starting with "Driver is just there for legal reasons" video) to Apr 2024 (when they officially changed it to Supervised FSD)

by jijojv

4/22/2026 at 11:34:26 PM

Does this mean Cursor is going to ship features faster or slower?

by dataviz1000

4/23/2026 at 10:22:34 AM

Especially for a end user product, this is the biggest example of don't sell upgrade-ability, and don't buy it if it's being sold to you. It's not an absolute rule. But it applies to about 98% of the market.

by Zigurd

4/22/2026 at 11:56:16 PM

Anyone who has owned both HW3 and HW4 would know this. There’s a big difference between my HW3 Y and HW4 truck. The truck can drive itself almost flawlessly from start to finish and feels natural. The Y drives like a robot and occasionally makes mistakes. I would pay reasonable money to upgrade it to HW4 so that my wife isn’t stuck on old FSD.

by qwerpy

4/23/2026 at 12:33:23 PM

Yeah but the point is that Tesla said you wouldn't have to throw more money at them to upgrade your Model Y to get new FSD. Maybe you knew that was BS from the start, or maybe you are a big enough fan that you're willing to give them a lot of leeway, but the lying is still bad.

Hardware obviously gets better over time and it would have been a perfectly reasonable thing for Tesla to say that HW3 is decent but HW4 would likely be required for future FSD capability. But they didn't do that. Maybe because they didn't want people to stop buying HW3 cars or maybe because they hate admitting that anything they do isn't perfect. Or maybe they really believed their own hype that software can magically compensate for inadequate hardware. Either way, it's not ideal behavior for creating trust in a brand.

by rainsford

4/23/2026 at 12:11:01 AM

I bought a model 3 in early 2018 and added FSD during one of the price drops in 2018 or 2019. Tesla upgraded it from HW1 to HW3 and now I'm curious if they'll upgrade mine to Hw4 before I end up selling the car (I think I have at most 2 years before the battery capacity becomes too limiting for me)

by addyhathaway

4/23/2026 at 12:23:57 AM

Lol you should just upgrade the battery lollll

by happyPersonR

4/22/2026 at 11:15:42 PM

Amazing that they're still peddling it. Must be closing in fast on a decade now, no?

by Havoc

4/23/2026 at 6:49:51 PM

The cult and stock pumpers will simply accept like Moon City and simply forget about Mars and deny he ever said that.

How many fingers I am holding up Winston ?.

They are so predictable and sad.

by tibbydudeza

4/22/2026 at 11:17:23 PM

I wonder if this will be another bait and switch. Despite advertising that "all Teslas will come with the hardware for FSD", and accepting that Tesla was willing to do hardware upgrades...

... they won't, unless you're paying for FSD. Misleading (from Tesla? Say it ain't so). They weren't advertising "All Teslas will come with or get the hardware for FSD, if you are paying for the service, that is." Might seem like a nit pick, but I can easily foresee a day where they say they're only doing upgrades for vehicles "newer than X".

by FireBeyond

4/22/2026 at 11:51:42 PM

They offer monthly subscriptions AFAIK, so I'm skeptical they'd upgrade for just any subscription. Otherwise, a person could buy one month, they have to upgrade the car, and then they never buy a second month.

by protimewaster

4/23/2026 at 2:12:41 AM

That's not the point, though. The car was sold, as advertised, as "having the hardware necessary for FSD". Sure, I get it, that they later realized it's not possible on older hardware, so they said they'd do the "right" (obligated) thing and upgrade that hardware.

But many people tell tales of "Well, we won't upgrade your hardware unless you actually pay for FSD first", which is NOT what was sold. At that point you have a case against Tesla for a material difference. Having the hardware necessary for FSD is not in any way contingent on you having purchased or subscribed to the software.

by FireBeyond