Recently, I came across an important update regarding Tesla. During the earnings call, Musk officially confirmed one thing: Tesla owners with HW3 chips basically cannot get true, unsupervised full self-driving functionality. This is definitely bad news for users who have already paid for the FSD feature.

Musk’s solution is to roll out a hardware upgrade program. Tesla will offer HW3 owners the option to trade in their vehicles at a discount for new cars equipped with the latest AI4 chip. It also opens up upgrade services, including replacing the onboard computer and camera system. However, all of this requires additional costs, which means FSD purchasers will inevitably face a second round of spending.

What’s interesting is that Tesla is not completely abandoning HW3 users either—it has released a streamlined version of FSD v14. But this is clearly not the unattended driving experience that owners initially expected. Musk also mentioned plans to build micro-factories in major cities to handle upgrade demand, which sounds like a sizable undertaking.

Investor reaction was direct. Analysts expressed disappointment on social platforms, pointing out that Tesla has sold about 3 million vehicles, 285,000 of which are equipped with FSD. If those owners are unable to access the promised features due to hardware limitations, potential compensation liability could reach billions of dollars. Some people even demanded that Tesla refund $10,000 to each HW3 owner to make up for this missing functionality.

This incident reflects a real problem in Musk and Tesla’s autonomous driving roadmap: the pace of hardware iteration is outstripping the speed at which software promises are fulfilled. For users who have already invested, the emergence of this hardware gap really tests trust.