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The Tesla MCU1 conundrum: How early FSD adopters were left behind in limbo
When Tesla started selling Full Self-Driving back in 2016, the company was in a far different place than where it is today. Back then, Tesla was not the most valuable carmaker by market cap, nor was it a tried and tested business that no longer needs credits to become profitable on a quarterly basis. Back then, believing in Tesla and its promises for innovative tech was not something that was done lightly.
Back then, it took a leap of faith.
And that was exactly what a number of Tesla Model S and Model X owners did. With Elon Musk and Tesla noting that every vehicle produced at the time had the necessary hardware to achieve autonomous driving, a good number of Model S and Model X owners decided to go all-in on the promise that achieving self-driving was just a matter of software. And if it turns out that it wasn’t, Tesla would ensure that early adopters would get the hardware necessary to make their vehicles on par with the company’s newer, more advanced cars.
This promise has not been granted by Tesla — at least not fully — and a good number of early FSD adopters, who were the first to put their faith in the company and its autonomous driving program, have now found themselves in a limbo of sorts. A limbo that now involves an aging vehicle, a fully paid Full Self-Driving suite, and what is starting to seem like a path to FSD that is blocked by the company’s old MCU1 unit, which happens to be linked to a recall of about 130,000 Model S and Model X earlier this year.
An FSD Limbo
The Tesla Model S and Model X were still fitted with MCU1 units when the company started selling FSD. By this time, Tesla’s reputation as a producer of the best electric vehicles in the market was already established. It was then no surprise that when the company debuted its first FSD demo in 2016, numerous Model S and Model X owners were all too willing to support Tesla.
“I bought my Model S in 2017 based on their advertising claiming that it had the necessary hardware for self-driving. Tesla advertised that I would get true L5 autonomy. (The ad) also stated ‘The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself,’” a longtime Tesla owner told Teslarati in a statement. The Model S owner added that he initially purchased Enhanced Autopilot for $5,000, but he later bought FSD for an additional $5,000 last year when Elon Musk noted that he was confident that complete autonomy was on hand.
Tesla is a company built on rapid innovation. Over the years, Tesla has gained a reputation as a carmaker that rolls out improvements as soon as they are available. Unlike traditional automakers that typically wait a year before introducing minor updates to their vehicles, Tesla improves its electric cars through over-the-air software updates. But Tesla had also implemented hardware changes in the past, such as when the company started the rollout of its MCU2 units in March 2018. The company also updated its Autopilot computer from Hardware 2.0 to Hardware 2.5, and later, to Hardware 3.0.
Elon Musk, for his part, has assured FSD buyers that their vehicles would have the necessary hardware when Tesla achieves full autonomy. And to some degree, Musk has stayed true to his word. Owners of older vehicles that purchased FSD were provided a free upgrade to Hardware 3.0. Tesla, however, has introduced its MCU1 to MCU2 retrofit as a paid upgrade. Quite unsurprisingly, some early FSD adopters opted out of the optional infotainment system update. This has proven to be problematic.
Apparent MCU1 Limitations
As Tesla started rolling out more advanced features, vehicles equipped with MCU1 units started getting left out of key functions like Sentry Mode and Tesla Theater. Enhanced driving visualizations were also available only on vehicles that were fitted with MCU2 units. It was over this period that early FSD adopters found themselves steadily getting left behind. New features would be introduced, but they would be focused on MCU2 cars. Software updates were frequently rolled out to the fleet, but not for MCU1 vehicles. This was highlighted by a Tesla Model S 75 owner who purchased FSD, and who shared a photo with Teslarati showing that his vehicle is still running 2020 firmware despite the car stating that its software was up to date.
The Model S 75 owner’s experience is not unique. Over the course of this article’s research, Teslarati has received similar stories from early FSD adopters. A longtime electric vehicle advocate who purchased a Model S 100D with Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving described his current ownership experience as similar to having a device that is no longer supported.
“In the recent past, I have not even had 2021 firmware update as if my car is already unsupported before all the features promised are delivered. I was hoping to get FSD Beta, but that feature has not been demonstrated for my configuration by anyone, so far and no communication from Tesla on exactly when we can expect our car to participate in this to provide feedback,” the Model S 100D owner wrote.
While Tesla may be quite silent on whether its older MCU1 units are indeed the culprit behind the less-than-stellar ownership experience of FSD’s early adopters, those who have owned multiple Teslas over the years have all but confirmed that the aging component seems to be a key issue. One Tesla owner who shared his story with Teslarati noted that his 2017 Model S — which has FSD and whose infotainment system was upgraded to MCU2 — received the “Request FSD Beta” button just fine, but his 2017 Model X — which is still equipped with an MCU1 unit — did not receive anything at all despite having FSD.
“Now the beta button is finally coming. All the early adopters that paid for FSD were eager to get it. Most people had their computers upgraded by now to the FSD version and were told that is all they needed; it would work fine on MCU1. So the excitement for everyone grew, especially those that had waited the longest. After several delays, the button came. My Model S got the button right away, but it never came for the Model X with MCU1. There was no communication from Tesla at all. No email sent out in advance. All of those people found out through the disappointment of not getting it. Then searching through chat groups, (I discovered) that no one with MCU1 got it. Why can’t Tesla show some respect for these customers and at least communicate in advance?” the veteran Tesla owner told Teslarati.
Transparency and Understanding
One prevalent theme among the early FSD adopters who contacted Teslarati with their stories was the lack of communication on Tesla’s part. This is something that has been reported by longtime Tesla owners for some time now. And while it is understandable that Tesla is juggling a lot of balls in the air as it expands its business to other countries and other segments, having a responsive communications team, or at least investing some of its funds into the creation of one, would definitely not hurt.
Tesla owners, particularly early FSD adopters, are more than willing to be understanding of the company’s plight and challenges, after all. In this sense, Tesla would probably be better off behaving more like a company that truly cares for its customers and less like a traditional automaker that is just looking for the next sale.
Unfortunately, this is something that became a reality for Tesla FSD adopters who purchased vehicles just before March 2018, when the company transitioned its vehicles to MCU2 units. As per a Tesla Model S 75D owner, his order initially had a March 2018 delivery date, but he was encouraged by the company to take an early delivery instead. As a result, he has missed out on numerous features, and he is yet to enjoy some key FSD capabilities that the company has been rolling out as of late.
“I have a December 2017 Model S 75D. I had placed an order for it in mid-December with a delivery date of March 2018. Tesla reached out to me just before the end of the year with a vehicle that someone canceled their order on. If I had known that March 2018 vehicles and not December 2017 vehicles would have MCU2, I would have never accepted the other car. I feel like they misled me on my order.
“I told myself I was okay with it because my original order stated it would be fully capable of FSD. Unfortunately, as years passed, MCU2 vehicles had plenty of extra features, and figured I would eventually get my FSD capabilities anyways. Unfortunately, I am now seeing Model 3, Model Y, and Model S vehicles with orders placed years after me getting capabilities I should have received. Now they are getting FSD Beta, and I am left wondering if I will ever get it with MCU1. I do not wish to spend money on the MCU2 upgrade as they said my vehicle was already capable,” the Model S 75D owner wrote.
What Elon Musk is Pledging Now
Elon Musk has been made aware of the issue surrounding FSD’s early adopters, and most recently, the CEO noted that early production vehicles would require some camera upgrades to get full access to the FSD Beta. Musk noted that the new cameras, just like HW3.0, were included in Full Self-Driving’s price so retrofits are all but assured. Yet even in the CEO’s recent statements, a reference to the complications that are seemingly caused by the company’s aging MCU1 units was absent.
Years ago, these Tesla owners put their faith in Elon Musk and his vision to achieve Full Self-Driving. And they were given a word. This promise has been met to some degree, but not fully. Details such as the absence of MCU2 units are severely hobbling the experience of Tesla owners that quite literally helped fund the development of Tesla’s growth into a mass market manufacturer and a key player in the autonomous driving sphere. And until the company decides to do something for its early FSD adopters, Tesla would continue to have some of its most loyal customers be subjected to a substandard ownership experience.
Early Model S and Model X owners are a small fraction of Tesla’s fleet at this point. The number of owners who purchased FSD and are still stuck with MCU1 units is even smaller. The costs to upgrade these owners’ cars would undoubtedly be substantial, but they would likely be marginal for Tesla in the long run, especially with the way the company has been growing year-over-year. Perhaps Tesla could provide complimentary MCU2 retrofits to early FSD buyers when they get their cameras upgraded for free. By doing so, Elon Musk could prove that he is a man of his own word.
Musk himself said it, after all. He may be late, but he pulls through. Now it’s time to stand by these words. With the rollout of the FSD Beta, Full Self-Driving is closer than ever. Tesla just has to pull through for a group of owners who took that leap of faith when the company announced its intentions to develop a self-driving system.
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SpaceX’s Starfall just went from secret to storefront
SpaceX now pitches Starfall missions with 1,000 kg payloads, weeks of microgravity, and Starlink connectivity.
SpaceX has put up a dedicated commercial page for Starfall, its disk shaped reentry capsule, laying out for the first time what customers actually get when they book a flight. The page, live at spacex.com/starfall, pitches “affordable, routine access to microgravity” and invites companies to get in touch about flying manufacturing, research or testing payloads.
The specs are short and specific. Each Starfall mission carries up to 1,000 kg of payload, supplies 1 kW of power and connects through an Ethernet interface. Mission length is tailored to the customer, and the payload stays online the entire time through Starlink, which means researchers can pull data from an experiment while it is still in orbit instead of waiting for splashdown.
SpaceX is launching a secret spacecraft that could change how things are made in space
SpaceX is aiming the service at three markets. Biomedical customers are told they can grow stem cell organoids, replacement tissue and layered biomaterials. Pharmaceutical companies are pitched on protein and small molecule drug crystals, which form smaller and more uniform shapes without gravity driven convection. Materials science rounds out the list, with semiconductors and other next generation materials grown in vacuum and microgravity.
The page also makes clear which rocket SpaceX is counting on. “By launching on Starship, Starfall brings a reliable and scalable cadence previously unavailable to the market,” the company wrote, contrasting weeks of continuous microgravity with the seconds offered by drop towers and parabolic flights. No price or first operational flight date is listed.
The commercial push is a sharp turn from how Starfall started. SpaceX said almost nothing about the capsule ahead of its first flight in June, and nearly everything known came from FAA and FCC filings describing a disk about 10.2 feet wide and 2.5 feet tall that can return 2,200 pounds of cargo. By its second flight on the Bandwagon-5 rideshare in October, Starfall was listed by name on the mission page, though SpaceX still did not say what it carried.
Customers appear to be lining up. SpaceX said in its third quarter results that it signed three commercial Starfall missions during the quarter. On the earnings call, President Gwynne Shotwell described the capsule as providing “routine relatively low cost access to microgravity environments for scientific research, including improving our understanding of diseases like cancer and diabetes,” and said the three new missions would fly on Starship.
The branding effort extends past the website. SpaceX added a Starfall T-shirt to its online store on Monday as part of a batch of new merchandise, giving the program a place next to Starship, Starlink and Starshield in the company’s lineup.
The move also puts SpaceX in more direct competition with companies it launches. Varda Space Industries, which has built much of the in-space manufacturing market so far, flew its W-Series 7 capsule on the same Bandwagon-5 mission as Starfall in October. Varda’s capsules are roughly three times smaller than Starfall, and SpaceX controls the ride to orbit for both.
Starfall’s near term cadence depends on Starship. SpaceX is preparing for Flight 15 after completing static fires of Ship 42 and its Super Heavy booster in late October, and is aiming to catch both stages with the launch tower on that flight.
Elon Musk said weeks ago during SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call that the company’s Grok Bot, its autonomous AI Agent platform, was showing “the fastest growth of a product” that he’d ever seen in his life.
Now, SpaceXSI is scaling back Grok Bot users’ weekly limits, much to the surprise of those who have relied on it to take away monotonous tasks in their lives.
Elon Musk’s terse November 1 reply on X captured a sharp tension in the early days of agentic AI. Responding to a user who asked for a Grok Bot usage reset after hitting 100 percent with four days still left on the weekly cycle, Musk wrote: “The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue.”
@DogecoinNorway The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2026
The post arrived amid a wave of similar complaints from paying subscribers whose meters had jumped unexpectedly toward or to the limit, sometimes overnight and with little corresponding activity. It also stood in clear contrast to statements Musk had made only days and weeks earlier.
On the SpaceX third-quarter earnings call in mid-to-late October, Musk had described Grok Bot in almost the opposite terms. He called it “the fastest growth of a product that I’ve ever seen in my life” and said he had “never seen anything grow this fast.”
Company figures put paid weekly users at roughly 800,000 earlier in the month, more than doubling over the prior period. Daily active users had climbed from under 100,000 in early September to over 600,000 by late October.
Musk emphasized that the product has no free tier and that users appear to be getting real value beyond what they pay. In other remarks, he noted that usage per user was rising rather than declining, the opposite of the usual decay pattern for new software.
Grok Bot, launched around August, functions as an always-available agent with its own persistent cloud computer; it can schedule, research, shop, browse, and execute multi-step workflows even after the user steps away. Access is bundled into X subscription tiers (roughly $30, $100, and $200 per month) and certain Cursor plans, drawing from shared weekly usage pools whose exact sizes have not been publicly detailed.
The economics of that model are what Musk’s November 1 post put in the spotlight. Agentic systems burn far more compute than ordinary chatbot exchanges. Each task can trigger repeated model calls, tool use, web actions, and sustained background work.
When growth is as rapid as Musk celebrated, the absolute compute bill scales quickly even if average revenue per user stays fixed under flat monthly subscriptions. Industry observers noted the opportunity cost as well: the same GPUs can be rented to other AI labs at higher rates.
A simple back-of-the-envelope comparison circulating after the post illustrated the gap: if every reported daily user paid the top tier, annualized subscription revenue would still be modest relative to the scale of compute infrastructure SpaceX is building and leasing to companies like Anthropic.
Some users also reported possible dashboard anomalies around the same period, though Musk’s framing treated the underlying cost-revenue imbalance as the core issue rather than a pure metering glitch.
The juxtaposition is the core of this exchange. Within roughly two weeks of publicly framing Grok Bot as an unprecedented success with strong unit economics and no free tier, Musk acknowledged that serving the same product had become unsustainable relative to the revenue it generates.
For the broader industry, the episode underscores a structural challenge of the agent era: demand is real and growing faster than many expected, yet the cost of fulfilling that demand through always-on, multi-step agents can outrun subscription pricing before companies can adjust limits, introduce metered billing, or raise prices.
Musk’s reply did not promise an immediate reset or higher allowances; it simply stated the constraint. In doing so, it supplied a rare, explicit public data point on the unit economics of a high-profile AI agent just as adoption numbers were still being celebrated as the fastest in Musk’s experience.
The tension between rapid, paid growth and the compute required to deliver it is now on the record.
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Tesla owners who tap Emergency Drive Away for fun are in for a surprise
Tapping Activate on Tesla’s Emergency Drive Away reportedly triggers a $539 service bill without moving.
Tesla owners who press Activate on Emergency Drive Away may be on the hook for a service bill even if their car never leaves the Supercharger stall.
Yaro, who posts about Tesla service cases on X as @Tutrifour, said a customer called after tapping Activate while still plugged into a Supercharger. The owner was about to pull away, remembered the cable was still connected and stopped. The car never moved, but the touchscreen showed a red alert reading “Emergency Drive Away has been activated” with “Service is required” underneath. A Service Mode screenshot showed the active alert BMS_a228_EmergencyDriveAwayServiceRequired, which Yaro said only Tesla Service can clear.
Here is a lesson to Tesla owners. Don’t press Activate on the new Emergency Drive Away feature on your Tesla because service charges $539 to inspect the charge port and to clear the alert. Yes, even if you didn’t move the car an inch. https://t.co/NZJENw4SQv
— Yaro (@Tutrifour) October 30, 2026
The cost of clearing it was the bigger surprise. “Don’t press Activate on the new Emergency Drive Away feature on your Tesla because service charges $539 to inspect the charge port and to clear the alert. Yes, even if you didn’t move the car an inch,” Yaro wrote. The $539 figure comes from that single case, and Tesla has not published a set price for the inspection or commented on the post. Yaro also noted that the car would still charge with the alert on screen.
Tesla launched Emergency Drive Away on October 1 with software update 2026.38.3, letting drivers pull away from a U.S. Supercharger with the cable still attached, as Teslarati reported. To use it, a driver shifts into Drive while connected, holds the brake and taps Activate. The prompt warns that driving with the cable connected will damage the vehicle and the Supercharger, and that short camera recordings will be shared with Tesla.
Tesla Charging has been clear about what follows a real activation. Repairs to a Supercharger stall can run up to $25,000 depending on the site, a service visit for the car’s charge port is mandatory, and deliberate misuse “will invoke additional penalties.” What the company had not spelled out is that the service requirement is triggered the moment Activate is pressed, not the moment the cable breaks away.
From an engineering standpoint, that is the cautious choice. Once Activate is pressed, the car cannot be sure the charge port latch was not stressed, so flagging it for inspection removes the guesswork. It also means the button carries a price on its own, which is a stronger deterrent against casual use than any warning screen.
Customer called because they have an active alert after tapping ACTIVATE on the new Emergency Drive Away feature. They didn’t actually drive away but were about to until they “remembered” they had the charge cable connected.
This alert can only be cleared by Tesla Service. https://t.co/SkHyJJPFwU
— Yaro (@Tutrifour) October 28, 2026
The report follows the feature’s first known real world use, when a driver in Austin during F1 weekend appeared to trigger it by accident and dragged the Supercharger cable along with the car. The Reddit user who filmed it said the driver seemed to have only half read the prompts.
For owners, the takeaway is to treat the red prompt as a stop sign. If it appears after shifting out of Park by mistake, shift back and unplug the normal way from the touchscreen, the Tesla app or the button on the charge handle. Activate is meant for moments when staying at the stall is the bigger risk, and Tesla is now pricing it that way.
SpaceX’s Starfall just went from secret to storefront
Grok Bot users hit with weekly limits early, Elon Musk explains what happened
