Overview
- Musk said Wednesday on Tesla’s Q1 earnings call that HW3 has one-eighth the memory bandwidth of HW4, which he said prevents unsupervised Full Self-Driving.
- About 4 million Teslas use HW3, leaving many buyers who paid for FSD without a path to hands-off driving unless they upgrade.
- Tesla will offer discounted trade-ins for buyers who purchased FSD and paid retrofits that replace the Autopilot computer and cameras, and it plans city “microfactories” to handle the work because service centers would be too slow.
- HW3 owners will still get incremental FSD software updates, but Musk said unsupervised use will require HW4 or an AI4 upgrade that he expects to reach production next year after Samsung’s hardware changes.
- The shift raises legal risk from customers who relied on years of software-only claims and forces owners to decide between paying for hardware swaps or moving to newer cars.