After repeatedly insisting for over a decade that Tesla was on the verge of legitimate full self-driving (FSD) — and selling cars with pricey computing hardware, based on the promise that they’d increase in value once the feature became reality — CEO Elon Musk has finally admitted that it’s not happening with the vehicles’ current hardware.
During the electric carmaker’s latest quarterly earnings call, Musk gave investors the “absolutely painful and difficult” concession.
“The truth is that we’re gonna have to upgrade people’s Hardware 3 [computers] for those who have bought Full Self Driving,” the brash billionaire said, “and that is the honest answer.”
“I’m kind of glad,” he mused, “that not that many people bought the FSD package” — which, let’s not forget, he spent years exhorting them to purchase.
As The Verge notes, Musk issued this revelation while interrupting Tesla’s Autopilot and AI czar Ashok Elluswamy, essentially contradicting his own executive while he tried to tell investors that the company had not given up on its HW3.
Elluswamy, to his credit, handled the interruption diplomatically by teasing that Tesla will be releasing a “baby” version of FSD while its engineers work on the latest version of the self-driving feature for cars equipped with the newer Hardware 4 computers.
The admission follows previous musings by Musk, during another quarterly earnings call last year, in which he appeared to realize that HW3 doesn’t have the juice.
“There is some chance,” the CEO said during Tesla’s Q3 2024 earnings call last October, “that HW3 does not achieve the safety level that allows for unsupervised FSD.”
“H4 has several times the capability of HW3,” he continued. “It’s easier to get things to work on HW4 and it takes a lot of effort to squeeze that into HW3.”
Back in 2018, the company began giving away “free” HW3 upgrades to people who bought FSD software for their Teslas. On this latest call, Musk reiterated a similar offer to FSD purchasers to upgrade them to HW4, Teslerati reports, though he didn’t give a timeline for when that might happen.
Despite that promise, these latest missives from Musk’s galaxy brain coming after more than a decade of kicking the can are beyond the pale, even for him.
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