Tesla did not address a heavily backed shareholder question about Hardware 3 (HW3) vehicles during its third-quarter 2026 earnings call, according to Electrek. The question asked when owners of those cars will learn whether they can get a free hardware upgrade to support unsupervised Full Self-Driving (FSD), which they paid for.
Tesla collects retail investor questions through the Say platform before each earnings call, and shareholders vote on them with their shares. Before the call, the HW3 question ranked fifth, with 557 votes and 652,900 shares. It read: "Tesla has acknowledged that HW3 vehicles cannot support unsupervised FSD. When will owners know whether they can upgrade their hardware for free, and when will Tesla provide a clear plan?"
On Wednesday's call, head of investor relations Travis Axelrod read nine Say questions. Tesla answered ones on Cybercab scaling, unsupervised FSD in customer cars, Cybercab ownership, and robotaxi and Optimus unit economics. It then moved on to Optimus training data, Optimus revenue, FSD mapping and factory production rates. Two of those, Optimus revenue and FSD mapping, ranked below the HW3 question in every list published before the call, and the training data question was outside the top 10. Axelrod ended the segment by saying, "That's it for the Say.com questions." No analyst raised HW3 either, and neither HW3, AI3 nor a retrofit came up at any point.
The second question Tesla took bears directly on the missing one. Asked when unsupervised FSD would reach customer cars, Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's head of AI, said the software already running in Model Y robotaxis and the Cybercab will reach customers with FSD v15. He added that "somewhere around Q2 next year" the first customer vehicles could join the Robotaxi fleet.
Electrek notes that this is another delay and that the timeline applies only to HW4 cars. On the Q1 2026 call, Elon Musk said "Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD," citing an eighth of HW4's memory bandwidth. Any date Tesla gives for unsupervised FSD therefore excludes millions of cars sold as having all the hardware needed for full self-driving.
Musk had addressed the issue on the previous two calls, without specifics. In April he spoke of "microfactories" in major cities to swap computers and cameras, along with a discounted trade-in. In July, responding to a Truist analyst, he said an upgrade would make sense "at some point" and raised the idea of skipping HW4 for a next-generation board or AI5, which goes to Optimus first. No price, timeline or process has been given.
Tesla's legal exposure over HW3 is growing. It sold FSD for up to $15,000 on the promise that its cars already had the necessary hardware. It now faces class actions in the US, China and Australia, plus a Dutch collective claim that has grown to nearly 7,000 HW3 owners and has a law firm behind it. Documents from Dutch regulator RDW show Tesla submitted only HW4 for FSD approval in Europe. This year, HW3 owners received FSD v14 "Lite," a supervised driver-assist system.
In its analysis, Electrek said it does not believe the omission was accidental, since Tesla chooses which questions to read and in what order. It pointed out that Tesla answered an Optimus revenue question it said it had "kind of already answered" instead of one backed by roughly 650,000 shares. Electrek estimates that replacing the computer and cameras in about 4 million cars, or compensating owners, would be very costly. It also noted that any statement could be quoted in court, so staying silent is cheaper for now.
