For nearly nine years, Elon Musk has promised Tesla vehicles had the hardware needed to support a self-driving car. This week, he made his latest admission that many are not.
Musk said on a conference call Wednesday evening that Tesla cars equipped with so-called Hardware 3 will need an upgrade before they can support unsupervised self-driving software the automaker is still developing. These Hardware 3 vehicles, sold between 2019 and 2023, are equipped with the older version of the computer that powers the company’s “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” driver assistance software.
“I think the honest answer is that we’re going to have to upgrade people’s Hardware 3 computer for those that have bought Full Self-Driving,” he said. “That’s going to be painful and difficult, but we’ll get it done.”
This is not surprising to anyone who has followed the company’s progress closely.
Broadly, Musk has repeatedly overpromised on Tesla’s timeline for selling a vehicle that can drive autonomously without human intervention. But the company has now repeatedly capitulated on its 2016 claim that every car it was building had the hardware required to one day fully drive itself with the flip of a switch — an unfulfilled promise that has been central to Tesla’s valuation for years. (Tesla has since deleted that blog post from its website.)
Tesla made that claim in October 2016, several months after it parted ways with Mobileye, which provided the original computer for its Autopilot driver assistance software. Tesla dubbed its initial in-house hardware — the hardware that it was referencing in the 2016 announcement — “Hardware 2.0.” One year later it started integrating a “Hardware 2.5” computer.
Neither of those computers were up to the task, though, evidenced by the fact that when Tesla started shipping cars with a “Hardware 3” computer in 2019, owners with older hardware had to upgrade to this new computer in order to buy the supervised Full Self-Driving software. Tesla initially charged for this upgrade, but one owner took the company to small claims court and got a judge to rule that Tesla’s 2016 promise was “false advertising,” and that the upgrades should be free.
Tesla has since moved on to building cars with “Hardware 4” computers, which had some owners wondering what that meant for Hardware 3-equipped cars. Musk and other Tesla executives had said they believed they could develop software that would enable Hardware 3 cars to drive themselves unsupervised, and one even repeated that claim on Wednesday. But Musk followed up by saying he’d given up.
His admission on Wednesday only further emphasizes that Tesla and Musk were wrong when they made that infamous proclamation in 2016.
Musk was unequivocal and defiant at the time, too, going so far as saying that the media was “killing people” by writing “negative” articles about crashes involving Tesla’s driver assistance system, Autopilot. “You effectively dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle,” he said on a conference call in 2016, a time when fully autonomous vehicles did not exist.
That is not the case today, as Waymo operates a commercial robotaxi service in multiple cities.
Musk said Wednesday that Tesla intends to prove it can do the same with a pilot program that it hopes to launch in Austin this coming June. He then wants to ship a software update to cars with newer “Hardware 4” computers that will allow them to drive themselves. For these reasons, he claimed 2025 will be “maybe the most important year in Tesla’s history.”