The Hardware in Your Pre-2023 Tesla Will Never Allow It to Fully Drive Itself, Elon Musk Admits

If you bought a Tesla from before 2023 in the hopes that a future software upgrade would render it capable of unsupervised full self-driving—the as-yet unrealized dream of a truly self driving car, in other words—that’s never going to happen, Elon Musk admitted on an earnings call Wednesday. It’s possible you might be able to get a hardware upgrade, rather than having to trade in your Tesla for a new one, but from the sound of it, retrofitting hundreds of thousands of cars with new computers and cameras is going to be a colossal new project for Tesla. The FSD hardware packaged known as Hardware 3 was standard until Hardware 4 came along in early 2023, though it took until May of that year for Hardware 4 to reach all models. (To tell which version you have, go to Settings in your infotainment system, then tap Software, and then Additional Vehicle Information). “Unfortunately, Hardware 3, I wish it were otherwise, but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD,” Musk said during the call on Wednesday. “We did think at one point it would, but relative to Hardware 4 it has only 1/8 the memory bandwidth of Hardware 4.” Some customers have voiced frustrati