[HN Gopher] Tesla tells HW3 owner to 'be patient' after 7 years ...
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Tesla tells HW3 owner to 'be patient' after 7 years of waiting for
FSD
Author : breve
Score : 128 points
Date : 2026-04-17 19:00 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (electrek.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (electrek.co)
| wjnc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Flatcircle wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It only nags you if the cabin-facing camera can't tell
| whether you're keeping your eyes on the road now.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Which is why you put a sticker over it.
| ggreer wrote:
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| 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.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| You experienced Time in a Flatcircle
| vel0city wrote:
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Which car? Seems like Tesla has the best version although I
| suppose it depends on the circumstances of the trip.
| vel0city wrote:
| Mustang Mach E. But once again, lots of other cars have
| similar self driving tech, many better than the Mach E or
| Teslas. The Bolt I was considering at the time could have
| also done most of that trip hands-free.
|
| And that was actual hands-free, while Teslas at the time
| required you to take putting torque on the wheel to lie to
| the system.
|
| Even then my 2017 Hyundai did practically everything but
| steer. Get it on the highway, turn on ACC, and it'll handle
| the traffic just keep it in the lane. It even did all the
| stop and go traffic.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Which ones are better today?
| kube-system wrote:
| A used toyota corolla with comma 4
| vel0city wrote:
| Ones that don't actively try and drive in front of trains
| in attempt to kill their operators.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMqTmOTtft4
| iknowstuff wrote:
| literally every single competitor will do it because they
| don't control for them at all. Most of them don't even
| control for traffic lights or stop signs. Also
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lc-HUZUiQg
| realo wrote:
| Highest end mercedes?
| iknowstuff wrote:
| No. Their L3 was a scam, never sold and not actually
| planned to be sold anymore.
| kube-system wrote:
| So, the same as Tesla's L3.
| 4fterd4rk wrote:
| 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.
| ggreer wrote:
| 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...
| vel0city wrote:
| I don't trust anything Tesla posts on their website about
| self driving. They've been known to post entirely fictional
| stories about their self driving. Crazy you still choose to
| believe them after they've been known to so brazenly lie
| there.
| electriclove wrote:
| Ok, try it yourself with a new HW4 and you will see.
| vel0city wrote:
| I've ridden in Teslas many times operating in "FSD"
| (read: not fully, and not self, driving), nearly every
| time its made some kind of moving violation including
| nearly hitting a pedestrian. No thanks.
|
| I heard the same thing in 2019, HW3 solved all the
| issues, it finally just works as advertised. That was
| after HW2 was guaranteed to ship with all the hardware
| needed for FSD _a decade ago_ , for real this time.
|
| I'll probably wait for HW5, then you'll tell me its
| really there. This time it won't even run people over,
| and it actually stops at stop signs more than just 98% of
| the time.
|
| Personally I try and avoid systems that drive people in
| front of trains.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMqTmOTtft4
| ggreer wrote:
| David Moss is a traveling LiDAR salesman. He doesn't work
| for Tesla, and Tesla didn't know about him until one of
| his tweets about his FSD experience went viral. Unless
| you think he faked images of his FSD stats for months and
| Tesla went along with it, I'm not sure what to tell
| you.[1]
|
| 1. https://x.com/DavidMoss/status/2010608939751047484
| vel0city wrote:
| I don't know who David Moss is, I have no reason to trust
| him. His tweets I can see are practically nothing but
| Tesla and Grok shill posts.
| ggreer wrote:
| Let's say, hypothetically, that someone has gone
| thousands of miles on FSD without intervening. What
| information would need to exist to convince you of this?
| vel0city wrote:
| More than a random Twitter feed and a news post from a
| company which is known to spread lies, that's for sure.
| ggreer wrote:
| How about if a guy who wrote an article titled _Five
| Things My Roomba Does Better Than My Tesla_ [1] later
| drove across the country without intervening?[2] Unless
| all three people in the car are lying, it seems like an
| independent example of going thousands of miles without
| intervening.
|
| 1. https://www.thedrive.com/opinion/40604/five-things-my-
| roomba...
|
| 2. https://www.thedrive.com/news/a-tesla-actually-drove-
| itself-...
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| The verified, raw data of at least 1,000 other people's
| worth of data, so the data has a chance of being
| statistically significant, rather than 1 random dude out
| of billions posting on elmu's website.
| hazelnut wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 6510 wrote:
| what do you think it is train drivers do?
| rzzzt wrote:
| Doing their absolute best with the steering wheel not to
| go off those pencil-thin tracks?
| bloggie wrote:
| Should Tesla pay people to use Autopilot?
| taylodl wrote:
| Getting paid to babysit. Tesla asks you to pay to
| babysit.
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| 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.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| That was exactly my experience with the free trial. I
| figure if I'm going to have to pay thousands of dollars to
| still have to pay full attention when I drive, I might as
| well keep the money and drive the car.
|
| FWIW: My 2026 Huyndai's driver assistance is better than my
| old 2018 Tesla Model 3's enhanced autopilot.
| wofo wrote:
| Sounds like babysitting an LLM, with the alarming difference
| that this AI can kill you if you are not paying enough
| attention
| wookmaster wrote:
| 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.
| iamjake648 wrote:
| 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?
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Because constantly switching between full attention and
| degraded attention (which the FSD promises) is more tiring
| that staying on full attention continuously.
| rented_mule wrote:
| It's easier to predict, understand, and react to your own
| driving behavior.
| californical wrote:
| I'm guessing that predicting the failure modes of a
| computer is more taxing than your brain using pattern
| recognition of what it needs to react to.
|
| If you're driving, your brain can automatically prioritize
| the importance of things that you see. But since a computer
| fails in different ways than a human, you lose all
| automatic prioritization
| lateforwork wrote:
| Think about a junior coworker you offloaded some of your
| tasks to. It turns out the coworker frequently makes
| mistakes. At some point you are going to say it is easier
| to just do this myself. Especially if a single mistake can
| cost you your life!
| burnte wrote:
| This is the real trick about 95% accurate or 99% accurate,
| if you never know when that 1% incident will occur, you
| ALWAYS have to watch for it. And eventually we'll have to
| live with the fact it'll never hit 100% accuracy, just as
| we don't have 100% accuracy today with human driving.
| jerlam wrote:
| It's not just "tricky situations", sometimes FSD will do
| things that no normal driver would ever do, and it will do
| them inconsistently. Sometimes it's brilliant and sometimes
| it's drunk.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| I know my normal, non-self-driving car won't randomly slam
| on the brakes or swerve into a median. Even if I take my
| hands off the wheel, I know it will keep going straight-ish
| for a second or two.
|
| A "self-driving" tesla is an adversary you need to
| supervise to make sure it doesn't take actions you wouldn't
| expect of a normal car.
| elictronic wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This is what the Tesla fans have been saying for years.
| "Oh, you're on the previous software version, bro. You
| gotta try the latest version, bro, trust me bro it's so
| much better. FSD on the current version is totally working
| for me, bro." "Oh, you're on today's software version?
| Don't worry, bro, the next one is going to be so much
| better, just wait for it bro, trust me bro we're going to
| have working FSD in the next version, bro."
| miltonlost wrote:
| I feel bad for all the other people on the road your friend
| endangered
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| marssaxman wrote:
| This system sounds worse than useless - automating the easy
| part of the task, while making the hard part harder.
| kube-system wrote:
| It isn't useless. Like cruise control, you don't need full
| automation to make driving more comfortable. Hands-off
| level 2 systems are great for long distance travel. I turn
| them off when I'm navigating situations that require high
| levels of decision making, however, e.g. driving through a
| crowded parking garage.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| not anymore as long as you're looking at the road.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Weird. Works great in cities for me. It's been more than
| fancy cruise control for awhile.
| coffeemug wrote:
| 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.
| shrubble wrote:
| 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.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| 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.
| a10c wrote:
| Australia is also launching a class action.
| kingleopold wrote:
| this is funny because roadstar is no longer coming ever and they
| paid even more deposit there.
| vostrocity wrote:
| 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.
| ggreer wrote:
| 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-...
| daft_pink wrote:
| I think the government is going to have to get involved for FSD
| from any manufacturer to actually take place.
| alHqn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| iamjake648 wrote:
| 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.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Maybe Elon can argue that no reasonable person would have taken
| his FSD promises seriously.
| rubiquity wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There is something uncanny about the way you've phrased your
| comment, as if to suggest nothing about what Tesla did was
| wrong.
| dmix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 3,000 owners from 29 countries signed up -- representing over
| EUR6 million in FSD purchases.
|
| The math doesn't work out. It should be \euro 20,000,000 in FSD
| purchases, no?
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