- Bought a Tesla before 2023? Bad news: your car won't be able to drive itself. - Elon Musk said last week that vehicles with previous-gen tech can't support full autonomy. - Longtime Tesla owners told Business Insider they felt let down by the company's announcement. For years, Tesla sold its EVs with the promise of an autonomous future. Now, some owners face being left behind. On Tesla's earnings call last Wednesday, Elon Musk said that Tesla vehicles shipped before 2023 — which are equipped with a previous-gen Hardware 3 computer — would not be able to achieve fully unsupervised Full Self-Driving (FSD). "I wish it were otherwise, but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD," said Musk. The billionaire said that Tesla would offer Hardware 3 owners the choice of a "discounted trade-in" or a physical replacement of their car's computer and cameras at "micro factories" in major cities. The announcement is a major blow for longtime Tesla owners, who paid thousands of dollars and have been waiting for years under the impression that their vehicles have the tech necessary to achieve fully autonomous driving. As far back as 2016, Tesla stated in marketing materials that all its vehicles had the necessary hardware for "full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver." In a 2019 tweet, Musk said that all Tesla vehicles produced since 2016 had the right hardware for FSD or were "trivially upgradeable." "It feels like a bait and switch at this point," Andrew Apperley, who bought a used 2018 Model 3 with FSD for $53,000 in 2023, told Business Insider. "They kind of shot themselves in the foot by saying that this is going to come, and then it never does," Apperley said, adding