Tesla has yet to officially confirm Hardware 3 compatibility for its upcoming Full Self-Driving update, despite AI assistant Grok revealing HW3 support details in social media exchange.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed on October 18, that Full Self-Driving (FSD) version 14.2 will be the iteration released to the wider public, following extensive testing of version 14.1.2 by early access users. However, a critical question lingers for millions of Tesla owners, will vehicles equipped with Hardware 3 (HW3) receive this update?
The Grok revelation
In a social media exchange on X (formerly Twitter), Tesla influencer and FSD beta tester AI DRIVR praised FSD 14.1.2’s improvements, noting that “95% of the indecisive lane changes and braking have been fixed” and that he hadn’t “touched his steering wheel in two days”. Musk responded simply, “14.2 for widespread use”.
The conversation took an interesting turn when user shawn.carelli asked Grok, Tesla’s integrated xAI assistant, whether the update would include HW3 support. According to the exchange, Grok stated: “Yes, FSD 14.2 will support HW3, as Tesla prioritizes compatibility across existing hardware for unsupervised driving. Optimizations ensure HW3 vehicles receive the core updates, though HW4’s extra compute handles edge cases more efficiently. Expect rollout soon without forced upgrades—Tesla’s committed to all FSD owners”.
Tesla has not officially confirmed this information, and the statement appears to come solely from Grok’s interpretation rather than any formal company announcement.
In October 2024, Elon Musk first admitted that HW3 might not support unsupervised full self-driving capabilities, stating: “We are not 100% sure. HW4 has several times the capability of HW3… There is some chance that HW3 does not achieve the safety level that allows for unsupervised FSD”. However, He promised that Tesla would offer free hardware upgrades to HW3 owners who purchased the FSD package if the hardware proved insufficient.
By January 2025, Musk had confirmed more definitively, “The truth is that we will need to replace all HW3 computers in vehicles where FSD was purchased”. Nearly ten months later, no concrete upgrade program has been announced, and no timeline has been provided.
FSD V14: A transformative update
The update features a tenfold increase in neural network parameters and introduces several new features available only to HW4 vehicles.
Tesla’s Q2 2025 earnings call provided little clarity, with the company stating that hardware upgrades for HW3 owners are “on hold” until unsupervised FSD is achieved. The reasoning, Tesla doesn’t want to roll out an interim upgrade that might still prove insufficient for true autonomy, necessitating yet another hardware replacement down the line.
However, approximately millions of Tesla vehicles on the road are equipped with HW3. Many of these owners paid between $6,000 and $15,000 for the Full Self-Driving package based on Tesla’s promise that their vehicles had “all the hardware necessary for full self-driving”.
Grok’s role in the confusion
The integration of Grok AI into Tesla vehicles, which began rolling out in July 2025, has added another layer to the HW3 discussion. Grok is available on vehicles with AMD Ryzen processors (MCU 3) but faces limitations on older Intel Atom processors (MCU 2), even within the HW3 ecosystem.
Grok operates primarily through cloud-based processing on xAI’s servers and its responses are generated using external computational resources rather than the vehicle’s onboard hardware. This raises questions about the accuracy and authority of Grok’s statements regarding Tesla’s internal plans, particularly when those statements have not been corroborated by official Tesla communications.
Tesla explicitly states that “interactions with Grok are securely processed by xAI” and that “conversations remain anonymous to Tesla”, suggesting a degree of separation between Grok’s knowledge base and Tesla’s internal product roadmap.
Musk has indicated that FSD v14.2 should roll out “in a few weeks,” followed by version 14.3 several weeks after that, with both updates subject to safety testing. He has promised that by version 14.3, “your car will feel like it is sentient”.
Whether these updates will support HW3 hardware remains officially unconfirmed. Tesla’s pattern of developing separate, optimized branches for HW3 suggests that if support does arrive, it will likely come weeks or months after the HW4 release and may include compromises in functionality.
For now, HW3 owners await concrete information, not from AI assistants, but from Tesla itself about the future of their vehicles and whether the Full Self-Driving package they purchased will ever deliver on its original promise.
Editor’s Note: Tesla did not respond to requests for comment on HW3 support for FSD v14.2. The information attributed to Grok in social media posts represents the AI assistant’s interpretation and has not been officially confirmed by Tesla.
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