Tesla will eat the HW3 computer upgrade costs of those who bought FSD to make unsupervised driving work on older vehicles

During the Cybercab announcement event, all the demo robotaxis were running the latest Full Self-Driving 13 version, and Tesla started to gradually roll it out to the rest of its fleet last quarter, just as promised.

It isn't exactly a widespread release, though, as currently FSD 13 is only available for that sliver of owners with newer vehicles that came with Tesla's newest Hardware 4.0 computer preinstalled.

For the HW3 crowd, "we released the 12.6 release recently, which is like a baby V13, but it's a significant improvement compared to what they had previously," said Tesla's Vaibhav Taneja at the Q4 investor call.

Will Tesla HW3 vehicles get FSD 13 or FSD 14?

Tesla isn't giving up on its HW3 vehicles just yet, though, and will try to shoehorn FSD 13 to run on the older computers. "We don't give up on Hardware 3, we're still working on it," added Vaibhav, but "the releases will trail the Hardware 4 releases."

Thus, there is still hope that Tesla will manage to make FSD 13 work on older Hardware 3.0 computers. After all, Elon Musk teased an unsupervised FSD launch for this year at the Cybercab event, and the feature will run on version 13. If Tesla can't pull this off, it will upgrade all the HW3 computers of those who purchased FSD to the HW4 edition, promised Elon at the Q3 call.

He has now reiterated this promise at the Q4 earnings call, but with much more certainty that a retrofit will be needed. When asked if Tesla will have to eat the computer upgrade costs, and how much would that eat into its profits going forward, Elon confirmed that they will most likely have to equip its older cars with new computers:

The honest answer is that we're going to have to upgrade people's Hardware 3 computer for those that have bought Full Self Driving, and that is the honest answer and that's going to be painful and difficult but we'll get it done. Now, I'm kind of glad that not that many people bought the FSD package.

The only thing that isn't clear from this answer is whether Tesla will upgrade HW3 vehicles with HW4 computers in order to run FSD 13 on them, or a swap won't be needed before FSD 14 rolls in.

The Cybercab ride-share platform will only arrive to the general Tesla owning public next year, though, so Tesla might be able to patch things up with FSD 13 on HW3 until then. For any subsequent updates, however, the owners of older Tesla vehicles will probably get a HW4 upgrade for free, and Tesla will have to eat the expenses.

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