Tesla skipped one of its top shareholder questions on its Q3 2026 earnings call: when Hardware 3 owners will find out if they get a free computer upgrade for the unsupervised “Full Self-Driving” they paid for.
The question ranked fifth by shares on Say. Tesla read and answered questions ranked below it. It went past this one without a word.
Tesla went down the list and around HW3
Tesla takes retail shareholder questions through the Say platform before every earnings call, and shareholders upvote them with their shares. When we previewed the Q3 2026 earnings as submissions closed, the HW3 question sat fifth with 557 votes and 652,900 shares.
Here’s how it was worded:
“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?”
Head of investor relations Travis Axelrod read nine Say questions on Wednesday’s call. Tesla answered the Cybercab scaling question, unsupervised FSD in customer cars, Cybercab ownership, and robotaxi and Optimus unit economics. Then it went on to questions about Optimus training data, Optimus revenue, FSD mapping, and factory production rates.
The Optimus revenue and FSD mapping questions both ranked below HW3 in every ranking published before the call. The Optimus training data one didn’t even make the top 10.
Axelrod closed the segment with “That’s it for the Say.com questions.” No analyst asked about HW3 either, and HW3, AI3, or a retrofit didn’t come up once during the entire call.
The skipped question is the other half of the one Tesla answered
The second question Tesla took was “When can we anticipate FSD unsupervised in customer cars?”
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s head of AI, answered that the same software running in Model Y robotaxis and the Cybercab will come to customers with FSD v15, and that “somewhere around Q2 next year” the first customer vehicles could join the Robotaxi fleet.
That’s another delay, a new timeline that history suggests will likely be pushed back, and an HW4 answer. Musk admitted on the Q1 2026 call that “Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD,” citing an eighth of HW4’s memory bandwidth. So every time Tesla gives a date for unsupervised FSD, it’s a date that doesn’t apply to millions of cars Tesla sold as having all the hardware needed for full self-driving.
And HW3 owners have been promised something by Musk on each of the last two calls. In April, he talked about “microfactories” in major cities to swap computers and cameras, and a discounted trade-in. In July, when a Truist analyst asked about it, Musk said upgrading would make sense “at some point” and floated skipping HW4 for a next-gen board or AI5, which goes to Optimus first.
No cost, no timeline, no process. And this quarter, not even a mention.
Tesla’s legal exposure on HW3 keeps growing
Tesla sold FSD for up to $15,000 on the promise that its cars already had the hardware. Now it’s facing class actions in the US, China, and Australia, and a Dutch collective claim that grew to nearly 7,000 HW3 owners with a law firm behind it. Documents from Dutch regulator RDW show Tesla only submitted HW4 for FSD approval in Europe.
HW3 owners got a stripped-down FSD v14 “Lite” this year. It’s a supervised driver assist, and it doesn’t come close to what they bought.
Electrek’s Take
We don’t think this was an accident. Tesla picks which Say questions it reads and in what order, and it chose to answer a question about Optimus revenue it said it had “kind of already answered” over one backed by 650,000 shares about the product its customers already paid for.
Any answer Tesla gives on HW3 has a dollar figure attached, and it’s probably a big one: replacing the computer and cameras in what we estimate to be around 4 million cars, or compensating owners. Every statement on it can also end up quoted in court. Saying nothing is cheaper, at least this quarter.
But Tesla can’t have it both ways. It can’t tell shareholders that unsupervised FSD is coming to customer cars by Q2 2027 while ignoring the owners who bought that exact feature years ago and whose cars will never get it. Many of them paid up to $15,000 upfront for it.
The HW3 upgrade isn’t an engineering problem at this point. Musk already said the hardware can’t do it. It’s a question of whether Tesla will pay to honor what it sold, and right now the answer looks like silence. Will an HW3 owner ever get a real plan before a judge forces one? I bet on nope.
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