Tesla CEO Elon Musk dropped a bombshell during the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call on April 22. Hardware 3 vehicles—about 4 million cars sold from 2019 to 2023—simply can’t handle unsupervised Full Self-Driving. “Unfortunately, Hardware 3—I wish it were otherwise—but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD,” Musk said. The culprit? Memory bandwidth. HW3 packs just one-eighth that of Hardware 4. And that’s the choke point for the AI models powering true autonomy. Owners shelled out $8,000 to $15,000 for FSD packages back then. Tesla marketed those cars as ready for full autonomy with a software update. Seven years on, no such luck. Musk once insisted HW3 had “all the hardware necessary, compute and otherwise, for Full Self-Driving.” Now, reality bites. But Tesla isn’t leaving owners stranded. Or is it? Options include discounted trade-ins for HW4-equipped cars or hardware swaps—new computers and cameras.…