buy a new Tesla

In April 2019 Tesla launched its platform “Hardware 3” (HW3) with an apparently blunt message: all cars leaving the factory would have, thanks to this platform, the necessary hardware for complete autonomous driving. There were many customers who trusted that promise and They spent between 8,000 and 15,000 dollars to enjoy itbut they have just found themselves in a huge bucket of cold water: HW3 is not powerful enough for unattended FSD, Elon Musk has assured.

The technical reason. The HW3 bottleneck that Musk alluded to is memory bandwidth: this platform has only one eighth of the memory bandwidth that HW4 has. The FSD system is based on so-called autoregressive transformers and to be able to work with them a specific bandwidth is necessary that cars with HW3 cannot reach.

There is no easy way to fix it. You cannot optimize the software or the AI ​​model: it is the chip itself that is physically limited and no OTA update can fix the problem. Elon Musk made it clear in the investor conference after the presentation of quarterly results: “I wish it were different,” he explained, “but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capacity to achieve FSD without supervision.”

Millions of vehicles affected. There are an estimated four million Tesla vehicles active and on the road that are based on HW3. Of those, around 285,000 bought the FSD package. Investor Ross Gerber indicated in X that Tesla’s financial liability could amount to several billion dollars.

Better buy a new Tesla. The firm has not announced refunds or compensation to those affected. What it does offer are two alternatives. The first, a trade-in (deliver your car and buy a Tesla with HW4) without giving specific financial details. The second, a free update they have called “V14-lite”, which will reach owners of cars with HW3 in June. Theoretically, this version will offer the FSD v14 options adapted to that older hardware. It is an improvement, yes, but not what was promised for users who have been stuck on FSD v12.6 for a long time.

Complex modification. Musk too speak They will offer the ability to upgrade the car to replace the HW3, but the cameras will also need to be replaced.

“To do this efficiently, we will have to create microfactories in big cities to do it efficiently. Everything is done in the technical service. It is extremely slow and inefficient to do it. I think over time what makes sense for us is to convert all the HW3 cars to HW4, because that is what will allow them to enter the robotaxis fleet and have unsupervised FSD.”

Versions for some, versions for others. While these models were progressively left behind in the support of FSD versions, the new models equipped with HW4 have been able to enjoy FSD v13 and FSD v14, the most recent and powerful versions of this driving assistance software. In fact, we were able to test FSD (Supervised) a few days ago, an FSD v14 version of this system.

In Europe there are also affected. In Europe there were also users who purchased Tesla’s FSD package even without being able to use it legally on European roads. One of those users, Mischa Sigtermans, is a Dutchman who bought his model 3 in 2019 waiting for FSD’s promise to be fulfilled and paid 6,400 euros for it. Seven years later he finds that the FSD (Supervised) mode has finally been approved in his country, but he cannot use it because his car is HW3. has created a website for Europeans affected by the problem and has received 3,000 registrations, which represents six million euros in FSD purchases.

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