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Tesla Model 3 gets Full Self-Driving HW3 upgrade: Full details with lessons learned
True to Elon Musk’s expectations on Twitter last month, it appears that Tesla is now looking to ramp Hardware 3 retrofits for owners who purchased the Full Self-Driving suite and whose cars are equipped with HW2 or HW2.5. A recent account involving a Tesla owner-enthusiast’s experience with her Model 3’s HW3 upgrade shows that there are still some areas in the retrofit process that can be improved.
Tesla Model 3 owner-enthusiast TeslaJoy was looking to do a video on the company’s recent voice command update when she noticed that the feature on her vehicle was not working properly. This prompted her to make an appointment with Tesla to get her car checked in and fixed. During the troubleshooting process, she inquired if a possible HW3 retrofit could be done to her vehicle as well. Fortunately, a HW3 unit was available for her Model 3, and so, a rather eventful upgrade process began.
Tesla Service Centers currently receive batches of HW3 units from the electric car maker, and each unit is assigned to a specific VIN. This is the reason why for now, at least, owners are not advised to call Tesla to schedule a HW3 retrofit. Fortunately for Joy, the Tesla Service Center opted to perform the HW3 upgrade at the same time as her appointment, since she would need to bring her Model 3 back for a retrofit anyway.
Since the retrofit was estimated to take around 5 hours, Tesla asked the Model 3 owner to leave her car for the day and claim it the next business day. That was December 31, which meant that the vehicle should be ready the day after New Year’s. As it would turn out, the Service Center would end up encountering difficulties installing the necessary firmware on Joy’s Model 3. This resulted in delays, which culminated in the vehicle’s HW3 retrofit being completed on January 5, 2020, over five days after the Model 3 owner turned in her car.
Hardware 3 retrofits are available for owners who have purchased Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite, and whose cars are still equipped with the company’s HW2 and HW2.5 units. With Hardware 3 installed, owners will be able to utilize the full suite of FSD capabilities that the company is rolling out today. One of these is the FSD preview that Tesla rolled out for the holidays, as well as features like traffic cone recognition.
True to Elon Musk’s words on Twitter, the HW3 retrofit is free for owners who have purchased the company’s FSD suite. Joy, for her part, was able to get FSD last March at a discounted price of $2,000 on top of her Enhanced Autopilot. FSD currently costs $7,000 when it is included in a new vehicle’s order.
Based on Joy’s experience, it appears that owners should expect to wait some time for their vehicles are set to be retrofitted. In the Model 3 owner’s case, her car’s upgrade ended up taking days since the first HW3 kit that was installed did not function properly. This resulted in the vehicle essentially getting retrofitted twice, causing delays. Tesla did give Joy a $500 Uber voucher due to the absence of loaner vehicles, but the whole experience showed notable points for improvement nonetheless.
In a way, TeslaJoy‘s experience with her Model 3’s HW3 retrofit stands in stark contrast with the experiences of Model S owner Sofiaan Fraval, whose car was upgraded by a Service Center during a voluntary HEPA replacement. In Fraval’s case, his Model S was fully retrofitted within a matter of hours, and it was calibrated in pretty much the same day. A Tesla Model S owner who runs the Electric Dreams YouTube channel also received his vehicle’s HW3 retrofit without any issues, and it was performed by a mobile technician, not a Service Center.
In the Electric Dreams host’s case, the entire HW3 retrofit was conducted from the convenience of his home, with a mobile service tech coming over in the morning, taking an hour and a half for the installation to be completed, and an additional two hours for the necessary firmware to be loaded onto the vehicle. This is in line with Elon Musk’s previous statement on Twitter, where he stated that HW3 retrofits should be possible through Tesla’s mobile service fleet.
Overall, there seems to be a variance with regards to the experience of owners when getting their vehicles retrofitted with Tesla’s FSD computer. Some owners seem to be experiencing a seamless, painless process, while some, like Joy, end up having to test their patience. Hopefully, as Tesla ramps its HW3 retrofits this quarter, the company could work in optimizing its upgrade process, so there are more experiences like the Electric Dreams host’s, and less like TeslaJoy‘s.
Watch TeslaJoy‘s HW3 experience in the video below.
Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
SpaceX’s Starship flew successfully Friday, landing both stages and deploying its first Starlink V3 satellites.
Starship’s thirteenth test flight delivered exactly what SpaceX needed with a clean liftoff, two successful stage recoveries, and the first real payload the vehicle has ever carried to space. Booster 20 and Ship 40 lifted off at 5:51 p.m. CT from Starbase, and by the time the mission wrapped roughly an hour later, both halves of the rocket had done exactly what they were supposed to do.
Booster 20 separated from Ship 40 a few minutes into the flight and stuck a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about six minutes after liftoff. That is a meaningful turnaround from Flight 12 in May, when the booster lost several engines during its boostback burn before a hard water landing attempt.
Starship as seen from Starlink satellites pic.twitter.com/e2hvfmnewh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
Starship 40’s performance was arguably the bigger win. The vehicle deployed the first 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever carried, then flew a suborbital arc to a landing in the Indian Ocean that SpaceX commentator Dan Huot called the company’s softest splashdown yet. “This is a dream scenario for this team that’s trying to get this heat shield data,” Huot said on the live broadcast, according to Space.com’s live coverage. “I’m a little over the moon right now. Wow. Lucky number 13.”
Unlike the mass simulators SpaceX flew on Flight 12, these were production Starlink V3 satellites, meant to extend solar arrays and antennas and attempt to link with the broader constellation before reentering minutes later. Getting real hardware through a full deploy sequence on only the second flight of the V3 generation keeps Starship on schedule for the payload work NASA is counting on for future Artemis lunar landings.
What an awesome launch, really seems like everything went super well and it was all incredibly smooth.
SpaceX is awesome. Very interested to see how the market will respond on Monday pic.twitter.com/KSHmyBfV55
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
The flight also arrives at a moment when SpaceX needed a win. SPCX has traded below its $135 IPO price since mid-July, as Teslarati reported when the mission slipped to Friday, and short interest has climbed to roughly a third of the tradable float. A clean flight will not fix a balance sheet, but it does answer the one question SpaceX absolutely needed answered this week: whether the fixes made after the July 16 abort would hold up under real flight conditions. They did, on both stages, on the first try after the redesign.
SpaceX has not set a target date for Flight 14, though the company has said it wants to push toward an orbital attempt on the next mission. After Friday, that goal looks a lot more within reach.
Tesla’s Supercharger Diner in Los Angeles dominated the company’s global usage rankings after just one year, proving the concept is more than just a one-off novelty location that will fade away.
The performance could incite the company to build more locations, something that CEO Elon Musk has hinted at for some time.
Tesla’s Supercharger Diner delivered 21.2 GWh of energy in its first year of operation, the company’s head of Charging, Max de Zegher, revealed on X. Of the top 10 most utilized Supercharger locations in Tesla’s global infrastructure, the Diner in Los Angeles was the most used by drivers, and it wasn’t particularly close:
Tesla Diner opened exactly 1 year ago. Inspiring that futuristic places like this exist.
It’s our highest usage Supercharger in the world: 21.2 GWh delivered in a year, 1.6k sessions/day.
Top 10 Superchargers by energy delivered: https://t.co/9YvJ8lw696 pic.twitter.com/koB3AUJHws
— Max (@MdeZegher) July 21, 2026
On its launch day one year ago, nobody was too sure what the Tesla Diner would be about. It seemed like an interesting concept, and considering it had been in the works for years, it was a highly anticipated launch that many were looking forward to.
Based on its success, we could see additional Diners with Superchargers built throughout the United States, and potentially beyond. Musk has said on several occasions that the company would be willing to bring the Diner idea to more markets.
Tesla makes major change at Supercharger Diner amid epic demand
Of the markets that Musk has mentioned, both Palo Alto and Austin have come to be perceived as ideal selections. However, there are no concrete plans as of now to build new Supercharger Diners anywhere; the location on Santa Monica Boulevard will remain the exclusive spot to pick up Tesla-inspired eats, at least for the time being.
Tesla short sellers won big following the company’s massive fall on Wall Street after it reported subpar Earnings on Wednesday.
Tesla short sellers collected about $4.12 billion in single-day profits on Thursday, according to Bloomberg. Shares fell as much as 15 percent during Thursday’s session. It closed as one of the worst days for Tesla on Wall Street in the past three years.
Investors sold off the stock after Tesla said it would aggressively direct its spending toward AI and its Optimus robot project. The company had record revenues, which were driven by one of the strongest quarters in terms of vehicle deliveries in company history.
However, it missed EPS estimates by reporting just $0.33, a far cry from the $0.53 analysts expected.
S3 Partners reported that about 3 percent of Tesla’s outstanding stock is sold short. Managing Director at S3, Ihor Dusaniwsky, provided the short seller’s potential profit, as well as another figure: shorts have likely had paper gains of $8.92 billion this year, as Tesla shares are down 30 percent in 2026.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla has burned short sellers many times in the past, but the company’s latest Earnings Call was a chance for those skeptics to taste some payback. Although the company gave some very transparent information regarding future projects, the rollout of Robotaxi, Optimus, and Semi, many investors took their profits on Thursday.
Notable short sellers like Michael Burry have been transparent about their skepticism around Tesla shares. Burry just revealed three weeks ago that he had opened up a new short on the stock, stating he shorted Tesla shares at $416.22. “Happy it jumped back to this level,” he said in a blog post.
At the time of publication, Tesla shares were down about 3 percent and the stock was trading at $309.92.
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
Tesla’s Supercharger Diner probably just secured more locations
