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Elon Musk, the visionary behind Tesla, has long been celebrated for his ambitious goals and relentless drive to innovate. From electric vehicles to space exploration, Musk has a track record of turning bold ideas into reality.
However, one of his most audacious promises— Full Self-Driving (FSD)—may have led him into a corner from which there’s no easy escape. Could Musk’s grand vision for autonomous driving be a colossal misstep that’s now too late to fix?
The Promise of Full Self-Driving
Since 2016, Musk has tantalized Tesla customers and investors with the promise of fully autonomous vehicles. He claimed that every Tesla built from that year onward would have the hardware necessary for FSD, requiring only software updates to unlock its potential.
This wasn’t just a technical boast—it was a sales pitch. For an additional fee (currently $8,000 in the U.S.), customers could buy into the dream of a car that drives itself, potentially even turning into a lucrative robotaxi. Musk doubled down on this vision over the years, predicting timelines like a coast-to-coast autonomous drive by 2017 and a million robotaxis on the road by 2020—none of which materialized.
The allure was irresistible: a future where your car could chauffeur you around or earn money while you sleep. Tesla sold this dream to hundreds of thousands of customers, collecting billions in revenue. But as the years passed, the reality of FSD lagged far behind the hype.
The Hardware Hurdle
One of the most significant cracks in Musk’s FSD plan emerged recently when he admitted a critical flaw: the hardware in older Teslas—specifically the Hardware 3 (HW3) computers installed in vehicles from 2019 to 2023—cannot support unsupervised self-driving.
During a January 2025 earnings call, Musk conceded that Tesla would need to replace these computers with the newer Hardware 4 (HW4) for customers who purchased FSD. This admission contradicts years of assurances that all Teslas since 2016 were future-proofed for autonomy.
For customers who paid for FSD expecting a software-only solution, this is a betrayal of trust. Tesla has already lost a court case over HW3 retrofits, with a judge labeling the company’s claims as “false advertising.” Now, Tesla faces the logistical and financial nightmare of upgrading hardware for potentially hundreds of thousands of vehicles—a costly fix for a problem Musk once insisted didn’t exist.
A Shifting Goalpost
Musk’s response has been to pivot. In June 2025, Tesla plans to launch “unsupervised self-driving as a paid service” in Austin, Texas, using its internal fleet. This robotaxi service, if successful, could allow Musk to claim a victory in the autonomous driving race.
However, it sidesteps the original promise: delivering FSD to the customer fleet built since 2016. Critics argue this is a masterful deflection—blurring the lines between a limited commercial service and the widespread consumer product Tesla sold years ago.
Meanwhile, FSD’s current incarnation remains a supervised system, requiring constant driver attention. Reports of erratic behavior persist—sudden braking, incorrect lane changes, and even near-misses like a Cybertruck owner’s 2025 account of FSD veering dangerously off course.
Tesla’s own data suggests FSD version 13 achieves about 500 miles between critical disengagements, far short of the 700,000 miles between collisions for human drivers, according to NHTSA standards. The gap between Musk’s promises and reality remains glaring.
Regulatory and Competitive Pressures
The road ahead isn’t just technical—it’s regulatory and competitive. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has scrutinized Tesla’s driver-assistance systems, investigating crashes—including a fatal pedestrian incident—linked to FSD.
Yet, Musk’s influence in the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which recently cut NHTSA staff, raises questions about whether oversight will weaken just as Tesla pushes for driverless deployment.
Meanwhile, competitors like Waymo and China’s BYD are gaining ground. Waymo has logged millions of driverless miles and operates paid robotaxi services, while BYD announced in 2025 that its self-driving tech will come standard in nearly all its vehicles. Tesla, once the undisputed leader, risks falling behind as Musk juggles distractions like his OpenAI bid and political ventures.
Too Late to Turn Back?
Musk’s FSD gamble has locked Tesla into a cycle of overpromise and underdelivery. The company has taken customers’ money, built valuation on autonomy hype, and now faces a reckoning.
Retrofitting HW3 vehicles could cost billions, erode trust, and invite lawsuits. Sticking to supervised FSD indefinitely risks alienating buyers who expected more. And pivoting to a robotaxi fleet might salvage the narrative but abandons the original vision sold to consumers.
Perhaps the biggest mistake wasn’t technical but strategic: Musk tied Tesla’s future to a problem—full autonomy—that remains unsolved, betting on timelines and capabilities he couldn’t guarantee. His penchant for bold predictions, once a strength, now casts him as “the boy who cried wolf,” as he admitted in 2025. With regulatory hurdles, hardware constraints, and rising competition, the window to deliver may have closed.
Conclusion
Elon Musk’s Full Self-Driving dream was a moonshot that captivated the world. But as the years tick by, it’s starting to look like a mirage—an ambitious overreach that Tesla can neither fully realize nor walk away from. Whether through hardware upgrades, a robotaxi pivot, or sheer perseverance, Musk must find a way to salvage this vision. For now, though, it seems he might have made a huge mistake—one that hubris, not technology, made too late to correct.
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