Elon Musk promised that legacy Tesla vehicles with the old HW3 FSD computer may be retrofitted with the HW4 goods to run unsupervised FSD, if necessary. That promise is quite far away, it seems, at least when it comes to the Robotaxi platform.
The majority of Tesla owners won’t be able to add their personal vehicles to the upcoming Robotaxi platform, it seems.
Initially, Elon Musk said that Tesla will allow individual owners to start adding or subtracting their cars to its Robotaxi ride-share service at the beginning of 2026. The platform is in a pilot launch at the moment, but will eventually let them earn some money by loaning their cars to the fleet of driverless robotaxis when not in use, he clarified.
At the latest quarterly earnings call, Elon still claimed that, but referring to the cheapest Model Y that is expected to be released in Q4. It targets people who want a Model Y, he said, but don’t have money, and putting it up on the Robotaxi platform will allow them to recoup some of their costs.
The timeframe for opening the Robotaxi fleet to vehicles that aren’t owned by Tesla, however, has now slipped to the more nebulous “next year,” and Elon even admits that Tesla hasn’t “really thought hard about that.”
Tesla is apparently still focused on the expansion of the Robotaxi service area in Austin, then launching it in California, Arizona, Nevada and other areas with its own Model Y units running on a specialized unsupervised FSD software branch.
To add individual owners to the fleet, said its CFO, Tesla has to think of a validation process, down to the tire tread level, and it hasn’t really gone through that yet.
To top it all off, older Tesla cars won’t be able to jump on the Robotaxi platform and earn money for their owners, as their HW3 computers are too slow, at least in the beginning:
What we want to do is we want to get unsupervised done on Hardware 4 first. Once it’s done, then we will go back and look at what we need to do with the Hardware 3 cars. I mean like I said, the focus is first to get unsupervised out, and then we’ll go back and see what more work we need to do.
That doesn’t sound very encouraging for those with old HW3 vehicles, who form the majority of Tesla owners. Unlike the previous quarterly call, there was no word about Elon’s free HW4 retrofit promise if Tesla can’t make unsupervised FSD needed for a robotaxi service run on the old Hardware 3.0 computer.
Tesla is apparently now focused on making unsupervised FSD work on newer HW4 vehicles and going through the regulatory hurdles to launch it for end users, as well as on developing the “spectacular” AI5 chip that is so powerful it may have to be neutered for export.
Where all of that leaves owners of old HW3 Teslas when it comes to loaning them to the Robotaxi platform and earning money, is now more up in the air than it was just a quarter ago.
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Daniel Zlatev – Senior Tech Writer – 1814 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2021
Wooed by tech since the industrial espionage of Apple computers and the times of pixelized Nintendos, Daniel went and opened a gaming club when personal computers and consoles were still an expensive rarity. Nowadays, fascination is not with specs and speed but rather the lifestyle that computers in our pocket, house, and car have shoehorned us in, from the infinite scroll and the privacy hazards to authenticating every bit and move of our existence.
