Tesla tells HW3 owner to 'be patient' after 7 years of waiting for FSD

https://electrek.co/2026/04/17/tesla-hw3-owners-be-patient-7-years-fsd/

by breve • 3 months ago

224 214 3 months ago

wjnc• 3 months ago

He should try to cancel the original purchase agreement on the grounds that now the functionality is available Tesla has demonstrated no intention of delivering it to him, thus voiding the original agreement. Normally if a judge agrees, you get a full refund without controlling for depreciation.

Class actions in the Netherlands mostly favor lawyers.

LunicLynx• 3 months ago

I guess that’s the point, FSD is not available. What you buy is lvl 4/5 available is lvl 2+.

I think, this is a calculation to understand if an upgrade of hw3 to hw4 actually solves the problem or if hw3 must be updated to hw5.

One upgrade is more economical than two, but I would be annoyed for sure as well.

nerdsniper• 3 months ago

The definition of what “Tesla FSD is has changed over time. Earlier buyers were promised more, so they have a stronger case on that basis as well.

burnte2• 3 months ago

I think, this is a calculation to understand if an upgrade of hw3 to hw4 actually solves the problem or if hw3 must be updated to hw5.

HW5 is unlikely to solve FSD.

LoganDark2• 3 months ago

Doesn't canceling the original purchase agreement mean you have to give the car back?

bmitc• 3 months ago

I would love for everyone with a Tesla to do that.

redwall_hp• 3 months ago

That sounds like even more of a win.

akmarinov• 3 months ago

Yeah but it’s a 7 year old car, if it’s a Model 3 it’s around 20000€, nowhere near the original price

Flatcircle• 3 months ago

rode with my friend from San Francisco down to San Diego in his Tesla, and he literally didn't touch the wheel or the pedals the whole time. Then a couple days later we drove back the same way.

People don't talk about these cars driving themselves enough imho

freeAgent• 3 months ago

He should have been touching the wheel. Tesla nags you if you don't exert varying force on the wheel, so it's not possible for him to not touch the wheel during the trip unless he was using some sort of defeat device.

morder• 3 months ago

It barely nags at you if at all. I haven't seen it nag at me in a long time when I take my hand off the wheel. I assume it's because of the camera watching the driver that they allow it but I'm not sure.

aojdwhsd• 3 months ago

It only nags you if the cabin-facing camera can't tell whether you're keeping your eyes on the road now.

ggreer15• 3 months ago

That’s no longer true. As long as the car has a cabin camera (which has been the case since the Model 3 came out), it will only nag you if it can’t see your eyes or you’re clearly distracted.

satvikpendem3• 3 months ago

It does for Autosteer but not for FSD, which only requires that you look ahead at the road and if you do so then you don't need to touch the wheel at all.

olyjohn• 3 months ago

I've had this experience with Subarus. And it's fucking annoying. If the car is tracking where it should go, why do I need to put force on the wheel? It's like I have to keep steering it slightly the wrong way so that it fights back against me just a bit to keep itself in the lane. Otherwise, it thinks my hands aren't on the wheel and bitches the whole time. My hands ARE on the wheel, there's just been zero reason for me to put any turning force on it.

brcmthrowaway• 3 months ago

You experienced Time in a Flatcircle

vel0city12• 3 months ago

I've driven from Dallas to Houston barely having to touch the wheel or pedals the whole way. I don't own a Tesla.

Other brands have had self driving features for years now. Some even operate at a higher level of automation.

satvikpendem3• 3 months ago

Which car? Seems like Tesla has the best version although I suppose it depends on the circumstances of the trip.

4fterd4rk• 3 months ago

You have no idea what you're talking about. The highway-only driver assistance on cars like Fords does not compare at all to what you get on a Tesla with the latest hardware.

ggreer15• 3 months ago

Barely touching the wheel is a qualitatively different experience than never touching the wheel. HW4 Tesla owners have gone over 10,000 miles without intervening, including a cross-country trip.[1] The car even finds charging/parking spots and parks on its own. The only equivalent I’ve experienced is Waymo, and you can’t buy a Waymo.

1. https://www.tesla.com/customer-stories/cross-country-trip-fu...

iknowstuff9• 3 months ago

Just go test drive one before you attempt to make a comparison, this statement is embarrassing tbh

hazelnut• 3 months ago

Did a trial for a month. It's indeed very impressive but at the same time, it's also very stressful because you don't know how the car is going to react. So I was on constant alert if there were any tricky situations. After some time, it became exhausting and more draining then manual driving.

twothreeone• 3 months ago

That was my impression as well. You have to babysit the AI the whole time and if you fail to do that it's basically your life (and others' of course) on the line.

not_a_bot_4sho• 3 months ago

A while back, Tesla gave me free FSD for a month and so I tried it out. It drove me to work just fine, and I was impressed.

Then, on the way home it drove me home on the wrong side of the street and I had to take over. Such a silly mistake.

Similar to what you said; from there on out, it was more trouble than it's worth because you can't let your guard down.

wofo• 3 months ago

Sounds like babysitting an LLM, with the alarming difference that this AI can kill you if you are not paying enough attention

wookmaster• 3 months ago

Same here phantom braking on the highway, randomly turned off in the middle of an intersection turn and didn’t get over in time for exit and decided to brake in the left lane to try and force over. While it was fun to try it’s not reliable for me to trust. That and If I lean my head the wrong direction resting it I start getting yelled at by it.

iamjake6482• 3 months ago

I hear this a lot, and I'm genuinely curious why you think it might take more energy to be on alert for tricky situations. Wouldn't you already be doing that for your own manual driving?

elictronic• 3 months ago

This was my experience. Kept getting told just try the new version. When I would the issues I had weren’t fixed and I bounced off it again. For very long trips it’s nice, but so is lane assist.

It always had the feeling of being outside with your toddler by the pool. I can look away but I have 50/50 odds of a dead toddler if I do it for to long.

LightBug12• 3 months ago

Exactly. Said it before and I'll say it again.

I do not want to be the 'manager of my car'. That'd be a downgrade from being an actual driver.

Lane Assist, auto-stop-start, cruise control are enough for me and have been available mostly for decades and require a similar amount of attention.

FSD is a busted flush and I can't believe those who got conned by it aren't more vocal.

JPKab• 3 months ago

This is where teaching my teenage son how to drive was a great preparation. Also my wife is not a great driver and I've been married to her for 20 years.

Compared to either one of them, FSD is way less stressful and is a vastly better driver.

miltonlost• 3 months ago

I feel bad for all the other people on the road your friend endangered

kube-system7• 3 months ago

It is a great feature, but, ADAS is by definition not self-driving, no matter how capable it is at manipulating the controls. The lowest level of self driving is level 3, where the human is responsible for supervision less than 100% of the time but greater than 0% of the time. Tesla FSD is level 2 and requires the human driver to supervise operations of the ADAS system 100% of the time.

https://www.faistgroup.com/site/assets/files/1657/j3016-leve...

While FSD's manipulation of controls is impressive -- it is missing a very critical component that is required for self driving: the ability to guarantee whether or not it can make a safe decision. Tesla's FSD still offloads this task to the human driver. Once they can do this more than zero percent of the time, they will have achieved level 3.

marssaxman2• 3 months ago

This system sounds worse than useless - automating the easy part of the task, while making the hard part harder.

reaperducer• 3 months ago

he literally didn't touch the wheel or the pedals the whole time

I thought the diver was supposed to keep hands on the wheel in case consuming hits wrong.

That's why Tesla fans buy those weighted gizmos to fool the computer into thinking they're still holding the steering wheel.

iknowstuff9• 3 months ago

not anymore as long as you're looking at the road.

darth_avocado• 3 months ago

People don't talk about these cars driving themselves enough imho

It’s because driving on the freeway isn’t FSD, it’s a better version of cruise control, and other companies also offer similar capabilities. Within a city, the thing is a shitshow. It does random things all the time and it’s almost a larger cognitive burden on me to constantly be on the lookout for it to make mistake where I have to take over vs me just driving the car myself. For me specifically, it’s just impossible to drive because it fails to recognize curved streets and a couple of other irregularities just within blocks of where I live.

zwily• 3 months ago

Weird. Works great in cities for me. It’s been more than fancy cruise control for awhile.

coffeemug• 3 months ago

In a city not only does it do random things, when it does work it’s calibrated so poorly people behind me signal all the time because it’s too slow.

On a freeway it’s only kind of usable. It switches lanes far too aggressively and for no reason, to the point that it makes the ride uncomfortable.

What I really want is auto steer with lane switching when I signal, which for some reason I could never get working in any mode. It either doesn’t change lanes at all, or changes them arbitrarily of its own volition. And if I change lanes manually it turns off autosteer, which is too irritating to use in practice.

Tesla self driving, in any mode, is a bad product. And I say this as a Tesla fan.

expedition322• 3 months ago

Yeah it's cool if you're driving from Alice Springs to Darwin.

shrubble• 3 months ago

I'm literally ready to pay cash for a Tesla, once they make one that doesn't have a steering wheel at all.

If I can't go to sleep lying down on the seat as a sole occupant, it's not yet self driving.

platevoltage3• 3 months ago

They announced a Tesla with no steering wheel a while ago. Don't tell me that was vaporware.

bastawhiz3• 3 months ago

I regularly ride down I-40 and back in North Carolina in my Rivian. I don't touch the wheel from the moment I get on the highway until the moment I get off, pretty much, unless I decide to take a rest stop. The universal hands free is as good or better than what my old Tesla had, and it'll get updates while a 2019 Model 3 almost certainly won't.

On the other hand, when I got FSD trials in the model 3 in the last year or so, it never managed to get more than ~a mile without me having to disengage.

Rohansi2• 3 months ago

The big issue is that Tesla has sold all of their cars with an option for FSD until a month or two ago, but everything before 2023 is basically confirmed never going to actually have FSD because the latest software cannot run on the hardware in the old cars.

What's worse is this is all going to end up happening again when HW5 comes out and all of the HW4 cars start getting a trimmed down version of the FSD software from HW5, like HW3 is currently receiving.

Rohansi2• 3 months ago

God bless you dear

outlore• 3 months ago

Ehh I made the same trip (HW4, latest update), it’s not particularly impressive. The car gives up under harsh sunlight, tailgates big trucks leading to rock chips, switched lanes without signaling, sometimes would teeter on lane change and then swerve back.

xracy3• 3 months ago

Yeah, why don't people talk about how my model s tried to drive itself into oncoming traffic more? Not just anyone can drive themself into oncoming traffic.

But like, actually the reason is that the cars consistently make dangerous decisions when they're not being used as "glorified cruise control", and the sensors mean they only even get to do that during "perfect driving conditions"

josefritzishere• 3 months ago

Telsa appears to be doing crime. The EU does have clas action lawsuits. I expect one way or another Elon will have to issue refunds.

a10c2• 3 months ago

Australia is also launching a class action.

drevil-v2• 3 months ago

Got a link?

kingleopold• 3 months ago

this is funny because roadstar is no longer coming ever and they paid even more deposit there.

vostrocity2• 3 months ago

Not a Tesla fan or owner here, but I tested a friend's HW3 Model Y on FSD (Supervised) and it was completely competent. Not sure why EU owners seem to not have it.

ggreer15• 3 months ago

FSD on HW3 is a significantly worse experience. And no FSD version currently available to owners allows you to ignore the road. It's only the robotaxi software that can be classified as "self-driving".

Also the EU adopted laws restricting self-driving behavior, making FSD far less capable there. For example, the software cannot exert a lateral acceleration of more than 3m/sec^2. It must also cancel lane changes after 5 seconds after the start of engaging the turn signal. Tesla gimped their self-driving features in the EU & Australia because of this.[1]

It’s only the latest version of FSD (which only runs on HW4) that lacks these restrictions and has been approved for use in the Netherlands. Even then, it requires you to pay attention to the road, so it's not what he paid for.

1. https://electrek.co/2019/05/17/tesla-nerfs-autopilot-europe-...

vostrocity2• 3 months ago

It's amazing hearing everyone say FSD on HW3 is inferior because it was shockingly good to me.

daft_pink• 3 months ago

I think the government is going to have to get involved for FSD from any manufacturer to actually take place.

alHqn• 3 months ago

It will come right after terraforming Mars is complete, which will be next year. We will also have UBI and all illegal immigrants on Republican farms will have been replaced by Optimus robots.

zackify• 3 months ago

I'm one of these unlucky owners. I can't believe I'll ever get anything.

After paying the full cost and being stuck on old software that had a promise of having the hardware required for it

iamjake6482• 3 months ago

Same here. I would totally be fine if HW3 FSD was reduced to $50 a month, but charging the same $100 as HW4 is insulting at this point.

ProllyInfamous• 3 months ago

How much does it bother you that despite your vehicle [most likely] shipping with active lidar, the Tesla executiveteam decided to not write software for its modern usage? More or less than the decade of "available next year"s?

embedding-shape• 3 months ago

Here is the website where you (as a European) can gather and hopefully help provide more weight to the matter if you were among the ones that were promised something you're not gonna receive: https://hw3claim.nl/

It's run by the person mentioned in the article, and unsurprisingly the domain is Dutch, but seems the same thing will apply in lots of countries if FSD rolls out there too, not just Netherlands.

codechicago277• 3 months ago

Maybe Elon can argue that no reasonable person would have taken his FSD promises seriously.

laweijfmvo• 3 months ago

it worked for fox news!

Veserv• 3 months ago

Their lawyers already did that and got it ruled that Tesla’s statements are unbelievable lies and thus Tesla is not liable for deceiving customers or the public.

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califor...

On page 16, the judge states that the defendants, Tesla, argued: “Defendants also assert that several Safety Statements are corporate puffery. For example, statements that safety is “paramount” (FAC ¶ 325), Tesla cars are “absurdly safe” (id.), autopilot is “superhuman” (FAC ¶ 337), and “we want to get to as close to perfection as possible” (FAC ¶ 363). Mot. at 19.”

rubiquity• 3 months ago

I have both HW3 (2021 Y) and HW4 (2025 3). FSD in the HW4 is a delight. FSD in HW3 phantom brakes constantly both back when FSD was a pile of C++ and now with the "Lite" driving model. I don't see how Tesla can ever make FSD suitable on HW3 given the hardware (<200 TOPS).

skywhopper• 3 months ago

I’m forever dismayed that no government agency has cracked down on Tesla’s endless fraudulent claims. It’s a shame people were falling for it 7 years ago, much less today, but only the governments can enforce actual fairness.

Mobius01• 3 months ago

It would require an administration that had a modicum of care for the average consumer/taxpayer, and the current one isn’t it.

senordevnyc• 3 months ago

FSD was a sham under Biden too though.

dmix2• 3 months ago

The article is about a Dutch owner of an older Tesla who bought with the intention of using FSD (supervised) with HW3 but the government has not approved it's use for that model so the person can't use it.

You can use FSD with HW3 in other countries like Canada.

acron0• 3 months ago

There is something uncanny about the way you've phrased your comment, as if to suggest nothing about what Tesla did was wrong.

dmix2• 3 months ago

I was responding to the HN headline which doesn't clarify the context in which FSD is not available because I know people don't read articles. He could and should try to sue Tesla for the $6k refund which the article already says he's trying to do.

mlmonkey• 3 months ago

3,000 owners from 29 countries signed up — representing over €6 million in FSD purchases.

The math doesn't work out. It should be \euro 20,000,000 in FSD purchases, no?

adocomplete• 3 months ago

Bought FSD with my Model 3 back in 2018 here in the states. FSD still not delivered and no realistic timeline. Tesla is hoping we upgrade or sell car, but luckily we don't drive much and plan to keep it as long as it keeps running, so they'll have to make us whole eventually.

ricw• 3 months ago

But how? In the states you can’t even take legal action but are forced into arbitration?

xnx• 3 months ago

Many legal contracts include provisions to forfeit the right to trial.

jrochkind1• 3 months ago

Is the amount of money they'd have to refund if they just refunded everyone prohibitive, or is it more of an image/messaging thing, admitting you, erm, took them for a ride? It's clear those customers are never going to get it.

iugtmkbdfil8342• 3 months ago

Full disclosure. I am currently shorting TSLA so take what I am about to post with an appropriate amount of salt.

I gotta say I am continuously amazed how much Musk is allowed to get away with. I know he can get some things done and he is, apparently, skilled manager, fund raiser and bs'er of epic proportions, but I have a hard time understanding how all this didn't catch up to him yet.

stringfood2• 3 months ago

well he is the wealthiest most powerful person in the world right now, mainly because of SpaceX - I think this gives him plot armour until his eventual demise in 8.3 years

stackghost• 3 months ago

Hey maybe he actually is a genius. After all, he committed securities fraud at least twice and so far has suffered zero consequences.

yabutlivnWoods• 3 months ago

He's not a genius.

The elder generation of politicians he manipulated were educated in their day in historical allegory and gospel

Leadership is ignorant and clueless. No idea how "check the work" so to speak. Didn't matter to them. Trickle down made them rich. They ultimately began to encourage it

Congress is predominantly nihilists who pretend to believe in American norms to secure power

cj• 3 months ago

If it's true that Musk is getting rules changes so that SpaceX can be included in the S&P earlier than the current rules allow, I think there's a non-zero chance of Musk falling even more out of favor than he currently is, if not worse (if the SpaceX IPO ends up losing people money in the first 1-2 years)

reactordev• 3 months ago

The hype train will ensure the SpaceX IPO is successful beyond the 2nd year mark. Musk keeps making these moves because he knows, he doesn’t want it catching up to him. Better to offload the risk to Wall Street.

CamperBob22• 3 months ago

What's the old saying, again? "Musk can remain untouchable longer than you can remain solvent."

iugtmkbdfil8342• 3 months ago

:D As Abraham Lincoln once said, one cannot trust anything on the internet. Still, it is a carefully considered risk. I certainly didn't put money on it I am not ready to actually lose.

nickvec• 3 months ago

As it turns out, having unfathomable amounts of wealth lets you get away with just about anything.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 3 months ago

He has immense wealth from fraud and he is able to commit fraud because of his immense wealth.

DANmode7• 3 months ago

You don’t get away with it.

If you can’t walk into a pizzeria on a whim (thinking about sama this week), you no longer have your freedom.

cosmicgadget• 3 months ago

I don't imagine anyone is trying to manipulate TSLA with an HN comment so I consider your position to be putting your money where your mouth is.

platevoltage3• 3 months ago

The more money you have, the more you can get away with, and he has the most money. Capitalism baby.

CamperBob22• 3 months ago

"Everything I don't like is capitalism."

I don't like it either, but it's not capitalism. Nothing Musk has done would have been possible without active support from governments putting their fingers on the scale.

gigatexal• 3 months ago

So many people worshipped the jobs distortion field but it was nothing compared to the gaslighting Elon has been able to do with Tesla. The man promised things he couldn’t deliver over and over and over again and investors are it up turning his company into a meme stock devoid of any kind of fundamentals.

jijojv• 3 months ago

Paid twice into Full Scam of the Decade since 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3HCTVk3qME driver is just there for legal reasons)

Freedumbs• 3 months ago

[flagged]

enslavedrobot• 3 months ago

I have HW3 in Canada and I use FSD everyday. It regularly drives me for my entire commute with no interventions.

The fact that FSD in Europe has been massively delayed is mostly the fault of regulators.

Sad but true.

roryirvine• 3 months ago

Tesla are responsible for ensuring that their products meet the relevant regulations.

Tesla tells HW3 owner to 'be patient' after 7 years of waiting for FSD

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