Tesla Concedes Older Cars Can’t Run Promised Autonomous Driving

Tesla said on its April 22 earnings call that millions of pre-2023 cars—those built with the Hardware 3 computer—will need new cameras and a new computer to deliver the autonomous driving capability it promised in 2016. Buyers who paid for Full Self-Driving are offered a trade-in bonus toward a newer Hardware 4 car or a free retrofit, which Tesla CEO Musk said would require dedicated facilities to carry out at scale. An (inevitable) class action was certified in August.

Held to the typical standard, this reads as a clear trust problem. But Tesla is held to a different standard than other automakers. Tesla has a history of overpromising and customers have largely let the misses slide. This is the rare permission earned by a company that delivers a product that uniquely delights its customers in key areas so much that those customers will accept sometimes severe deficiencies in others. Class actions are common for large companies and rarely linger in public consciousness. Given Tesla’s track record, a situation like this would typically be a non-event.

What’s different about this failure is it’s not about a delay or something that can be fixed with an over-the-air update—it’s a mass hardware change requiring customers to either trade their cars or deal with a service visit.

It’s unclear whether even this exceeds the slack Tesla customers extend it. Customers still love their Teslas, and autonomy arguably wasn’t the core promise for most buyers. The tell will be whether a broken promise that requires more than waiting to fix becomes the thing too many customers won’t forgive.