Elon Musk offered no concrete timeline or commitment during Tesla’s Q2 2026 earnings call for upgrading Hardware 3 vehicles to run the latest Full Self-Driving software. The response follows years of promises that the cars contained all necessary hardware for self-driving.
Musk was asked directly whether Tesla still intends to perform hardware upgrades on Hardware 3 cars to support FSD version 15 and beyond. He replied that it would make sense to upgrade all cars with less than Hardware 4 and that doing so would be financially sensible at some point, but provided no details on timing, method, or cost.
Musk suggested Tesla might instead move Hardware 3 cars to a next-generation AI board, with moderate improvements over Hardware 4 possibly reaching production around the middle of next year. He added that the more powerful AI5 version would hopefully enter volume production later next year and would initially go into Optimus.
Tesla has sold millions of vehicles since 2016 with the claim that they had full self-driving hardware. The company later acknowledged that Hardware 3 lacks sufficient memory bandwidth for unsupervised FSD and altered its public wording on the topic in its Q3 2025 shareholder letter.
