Tesla admits HW3 limits

Tesla said this week that its older Hardware 3 cars will not be able to run fully unsupervised Full Self-Driving. (shacknews.com) (fortune.com) Chief executive Elon Musk made the admission on Tesla’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call on April 22, saying Hardware 3 “simply does not have the capability” to achieve unsupervised driving. (fortune.com) (thestreet.com) Musk said the bottleneck is “memory bandwidth,” meaning the onboard computer cannot move enough data fast enough for the larger driving models Tesla now wants to run without a human watching. (thestreet.com) That is a shift from Tesla’s long-running pitch that cars equipped with Hardware 3, first installed in early 2019, would become more capable through software updates. (thestreet.com) (electrek.co) Tesla has already been separating “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” from the driverless version it uses for Robotaxi service. In its quarterly update, the company said active driver supervision is still required for FSD and that it launched unsupervised Robotaxi rides in Dallas and Houston in April. (tesla.com) Musk said Tesla plans to move affected cars toward newer hardware, describing retrofits through local “microfactories” and a discounted trade-in path, but he did not give pricing, timing, or eligibility details on the call. (thestreet.com) The gap matters because Tesla has sold Hardware 3 cars for more than six years, and many owners paid extra for the Full Self-Driving package on the expectation that their vehicles would eventually support autonomy. (thestreet.com) (electrek.co) Tesla’s latest investor materials point in the other direction: more spending on artificial intelligence compute, new chip design, and the Cybercab and Robotaxi build-out, all centered on newer systems rather than Hardware 3. (tesla.com) (fortune.com) Tesla has also widened the consumer-facing Robotaxi push, including an Android version of its Robotaxi app reported this week, even as the company acknowledges that older vehicles will need more than software to join an unsupervised fleet. (notateslaapp.com) (thestreet.com) For Tesla, the result is now explicit: unsupervised driving is a hardware story as much as a software story, and Hardware 3 is no longer enough. (fortune.com) (shacknews.com)