No firm commitment on the Q2 call

On Tesla's second-quarter 2026 earnings call on 22 July, Elon Musk was asked directly whether the company still plans to upgrade Hardware 3 (HW3) cars so they can run its latest Full Self-Driving software. His answer offered no firm commitment. Instead of a concrete programme with dates and prices, Musk floated a loose set of options, saying it "makes sense" to move cars with less than HW4 onto a next-generation board built around a newer AI chip — either an AI4.5 or the AI5 processor Tesla hopes to have in volume production next year.

That leaves the millions of owners who bought their cars on the promise that they had "all the hardware necessary" for self-driving without a clear answer, more than a year after the question was first raised.

What Tesla has already confirmed

The uncertainty is not new. On the Q1 2026 call, Musk admitted that HW3 "simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD," pointing to memory bandwidth as the choke point. At that stage the long-standing pledge of a free retrofit was quietly replaced: HW3 owners were instead offered a discounted trade-in toward a car with AI4 hardware, or the option to pay to replace the computer and cameras.

Since then the practical concession has been software, not silicon. A cut-down "FSD v14 Lite" build began reaching HW3 vehicles in late June 2026, bringing the newer supervised driving experience and the mobile self-driving controls to older cars. But Lite remains a supervised driver-assistance system — it is not the unsupervised autonomy those buyers were sold.

Why this matters in Europe

HW3 sits in a large slice of the European fleet: pre-2023 Model 3 and Model Y cars, plus older Model S and Model X units, were delivered with the computer. Many of those owners paid several thousand euros for the FSD option on the understanding that their car would one day drive itself.

The timing is awkward. Tesla is still fighting for basic FSD (Supervised) approval market by market — France declined to sign off the system this month, as TeslAnt covered in the French regulator's refusal to approve FSD. For a HW3 owner in the EU, that means the supervised feature is only now arriving in a handful of countries, while the unsupervised version they were promised looks increasingly likely to require new hardware they will have to help pay for.

The open questions

Musk's comments raise more questions than they answer: whether an AI4.5 or AI5 retrofit will ever be offered to HW3 cars specifically, what it would cost, and when. Tesla has not published pricing, a timeline, or an eligibility list. Until it does, the honest summary is the one Musk's own answer implied — there is still no firm plan.