Tesla’s AI chief, Ashok Elluswamy, gave a new date on the Oct. 21 third-quarter call for unsupervised Full Self-Driving in customer-owned cars: the second quarter of 2027, written Q2 2027. The answer came to the top retail shareholder question, backed by about 1.1 million shares, which asked when unsupervised FSD would arrive in customer cars. Owners of cars built on Hardware 3, known as HW3, were separately told their computers cannot run unsupervised FSD at all.
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The date is later than the one Elon Musk gave investors in 2025, and it comes with a condition that changes what owners should expect to receive. It describes a step into Tesla’s own ride-hailing operation, not a car that drives its owner home while the owner reads.
A date that only applies inside Robotaxi zones
According to Electrek’s account of the call, Elluswamy framed the first stage as owners adding their own vehicles to Tesla’s managed Robotaxi fleet, where Tesla runs the operation. An owner’s car would drive unsupervised only where Tesla’s Robotaxi already operates. Elluswamy tied the schedule to safety, which Electrek described as the bottleneck behind keeping the service on low-speed roads and out of harder environments, and he guessed the safety issues would be solved by next year without claiming to know.
A second Electrek report adds that Elluswamy said unsupervised FSD would reach customer cars with FSD version 15, and that the first customer vehicles could join the Robotaxi fleet “somewhere around Q2 next year.” That is a narrower promise than the promises Musk has attached to FSD since 2016, when he began pitching a car that would eventually drive itself anywhere through a software update.
What Tesla promised before, and what the fleet looks like now
In July 2024, Musk said on the second-quarter call that he would be “surprised” if Tesla did not have unsupervised self-driving the following year, as Electrek recorded at the time. A year later he told investors unsupervised FSD would be available “for unsupervised personal use by the end of this year in certain geographies.” The end of 2025 passed without it, and the target has now moved to the middle of 2027.
The fleet that would absorb customer cars is still small. Tesla’s own Q3 update reported that the Robotaxi service reached nearly two million cumulative unsupervised miles by the end of the quarter, and that Cybercab rides began on Sept. 3 in Austin. The update, filed with the SEC as an 8-K exhibit, refers only to FSD (Supervised) and states that it requires active driver supervision and does not make the vehicle autonomous. It does not mention unsupervised customer cars, HW3 or the AI5 chip.
Service areas are modest. Electrek’s earlier look at Tesla’s Miami geofence found a zone covering mostly West Miami and a strip toward Doral and Sweetwater, excluding downtown, Miami Beach and the airport. Tesla’s California operation still needs a safety driver in every car, because Electrek reports the company does not want to hand data to the state motor vehicle department.
HW3 owners and the silence on an upgrade
The hardware question is the sharper one for people who already paid. Musk said on the first-quarter call that Hardware 3 “simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD,” citing roughly an eighth of the memory bandwidth of HW4, according to Electrek’s report on the skipped question. Electrek estimates about 4 million cars are affected, and some buyers paid up to $15,000 for FSD on the strength of Tesla’s earlier hardware claims.
On the Oct. 21 call, investor relations lead Travis Axelrod read nine questions from the Say platform and skipped the HW3 one, which ranked fifth with 557 votes and 652,900 shares. It asked when HW3 owners would learn whether they get a free computer upgrade. No analyst raised it, and retrofits never came up. Earlier answers left the door open without walking through it. On the first-quarter call Musk described city “microfactories” to swap computers and cameras, plus a discounted trade-in. On the second-quarter call, asked by a Truist analyst, he said an upgrade would make sense “at some point” and floated skipping HW4 for a next-generation board. Meanwhile HW3 owners received a supervised FSD version 14 “Lite” this year, which Electrek says falls well short of what they bought.
Legal pressure behind the timing
The stakes are partly legal. Electrek lists class actions over HW3 in the United States, China and Australia, and a Dutch collective claim that has grown to nearly 7,000 owners. It also cites Dutch regulator RDW documents showing Tesla submitted only HW4 for European FSD approval. Electrek reads the silence on the call as a cost and litigation decision and predicts owners will not get a real plan unless a court forces one, an opinion rather than a finding.
Tesla’s own filing offers a counterweight on demand: active FSD subscriptions reached 1.74 million in the quarter, up from 1.48 million in the second quarter, so the product is selling even as its headline promise slips. Electrek’s results coverage puts that at 67% growth over a year earlier and counts upfront purchases in the total.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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