Tesla: Older models lack hardware for fully autonomous driving Tesla CEO Elon Musk officially acknowledged the problem in a conference call. Resistance is growing among Tesla owners. Many Tesla owners paid thousands of dollars or euros several years ago for the prospect of autonomous driving, but have been waiting in vain for it to this day. This will also remain the case for the foreseeable future: As Tesla CEO Elon Musk has now made clear, several components of these older vehicles are technically insufficient for FSD. For its Full Self-Driving technology (FSD), Tesla has installed four generations of retrofit kits in its cars over the past approximately 12 years, which bear the names Hardware 1 to Hardware 4. In April 2019, the sale of vehicles with Hardware 3 (HW3) began. The package was available for a one-time fee of $10,000 or €6,800 when purchasing a Tesla, but fully autonomous driving was at that time nothing more than a much-vaunted future vision of Tesla. Many customers bought their Tesla with the prospect that fully autonomous driving would be possible with HW3 later through corresponding software updates. “Unfortunately, HW3 does not have the necessary capabilities” Now that Hardware Generation 4 has been reached, Elon Musk has officially confirmed what many had already feared: Fully autonomous driving will not be possible with HW3 without extensive retrofitting. In a conference call on the first fiscal quarter results at Tesla, he addressed the topic (in the recording from minute 31). “Unfortunately hardware 3 I wish it were otherwise but hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD,” Musk explained. Videos by heise “We did think at one point it it would have that, but relative to to hardware 4, it has only 1/8 of the memory bandwidth of hardware for and