Tesla is heading into multi-billion-dollar iceberg of its own making

Summary

Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving Supervised’ expansion is back firing as it exposes its shortcomings. Customers left without promised features are growing discontent and demanding to be compensated. It’s turning into a multi-billion-dollar iceberg of Tesla’s own making. In 2016, Tesla proudly announced that all its vehicles produced onward are equipped with “all the hardware for full self-driving,” which would be delivered through future software updates. The automaker turned out to be significantly wrong about that. Advertisement - scroll for more content At the time, it was producing its electric vehicles with a hardware suite known as HW2, which it had to upgrade to HW3 because it couldn’t support self-driving (FSD) capability. HW3 was produced in vehicles from 2019 to 2023 and Tesla switched to HW4 in 2024. At first, CEO Elon Musk claimed that FSD software updates on newer HW4 cars would lag roughly 6 months behind updates to HW3 cars to make sure to deliver the promised self-driving capability to those who have been waiting and paid for the promised capabiltiy a long time ago. That strategy barely lasted a few months. Tesla quickly started releasing new FSD updates to HW4 cars first and it now hasn’t released a significant update to HW3 cars in close to a year. Tesla only admitted in January 2025 that HW3 won’t be able to support unsupervised self-driving. Musk claimed that Tesla would retrofit the computers, but there has been no word about it for 10 months. Tesla customers are starting to be fed up. The catalyst is Tesla’s current FSD expansion in international markets. Previously, Tesla’s FSD was limited to North America, but over the last year, the automaker has been expanding FSD to China and now Australia and New Zealand. However, the expansion is back-firing as HW3 owners are starting to realize that they will never get what they paid for. In Australia and NZ, Tesla only launched FSD on HW4 vehicles with no clear plan for HW3, which the automaker already admit...