\n<\/p>\n
For nearly nine years, Elon Musk has promised Tesla vehicles had the hardware needed to support a self-driving car. This week, he made his latest admission that many are not.<\/p>\n
Musk said on a conference call Wednesday evening that Tesla cars equipped with so-called Hardware 3 will need an upgrade before they can support unsupervised self-driving software the automaker is still developing. These Hardware 3 vehicles, sold between 2019 and 2023, are equipped with the older version of the computer that powers the company\u2019s \u201cFull Self-Driving (Supervised)\u201d driver assistance software.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the honest answer is that we\u2019re going to have to upgrade people\u2019s Hardware 3 computer for those that have bought Full Self-Driving,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s going to be painful and difficult, but we\u2019ll get it done.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is not surprising to anyone who has followed the company\u2019s progress closely. <\/p>\n
Broadly, Musk has repeatedly overpromised on Tesla\u2019s timeline for selling a vehicle that can drive autonomously without human intervention. But the company has now repeatedly capitulated on its 2016 claim<\/a> that every car it was building had the hardware required to one day fully drive itself with the flip of a switch \u2014 an unfulfilled promise that has been central to Tesla\u2019s valuation for years. (Tesla has since deleted<\/a> that blog post from its website.)<\/p>\n Tesla made that claim in October 2016, several months after it parted ways with Mobileye, which provided the original computer for its Autopilot driver assistance software. Tesla dubbed its initial in-house hardware \u2014 the hardware that it was referencing in the 2016 announcement \u2014 \u201cHardware 2.0.\u201d One year later it started integrating a \u201cHardware 2.5\u201d computer.<\/p>\n Neither of those computers were up to the task, though, evidenced by the fact that when Tesla started shipping cars with a \u201cHardware 3\u201d computer in 2019, owners with older hardware had to upgrade to this new computer in order to buy the supervised Full Self-Driving software. Tesla initially charged for this upgrade, but one owner took the company to small claims court<\/a> and got a judge to rule that Tesla\u2019s 2016 promise was \u201cfalse advertising,\u201d and that the upgrades should be free.<\/p>\n Tesla has since moved on to building cars with \u201cHardware 4\u201d computers, which had some owners wondering<\/a> what that meant for Hardware 3-equipped cars. Musk and other Tesla executives had said they believed they could develop software that would enable Hardware 3 cars to drive themselves unsupervised, and one even repeated that claim on Wednesday. But Musk followed up by saying he\u2019d given up.<\/p>\n His admission on Wednesday only further emphasizes that Tesla and Musk were wrong when they made that infamous proclamation in 2016.<\/p>\n Musk was unequivocal and defiant at the time, too, going so far as saying that the media was \u201ckilling people\u201d by writing \u201cnegative\u201d articles about crashes involving Tesla\u2019s driver assistance system, Autopilot. \u201cYou effectively dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle,\u201d he said on a conference call in 2016, a time when fully autonomous vehicles did not exist.<\/p>\n That is not the case today, as Waymo operates a commercial robotaxi service in multiple cities. <\/p>\n Musk said Wednesday that Tesla intends to prove it can do the same with a pilot program that it hopes to launch in Austin this coming June<\/a>. He then wants to ship a software update to cars with newer \u201cHardware 4\u201d computers that will allow them to drive themselves. For these reasons, he claimed 2025 will be \u201cmaybe the most important year in Tesla\u2019s history.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n