Tesla Q3 2025 Earnings: Tesla partly retracts the retrofit commitment and announces 'v14 Lite' for HW3

Nine months later, a different story

On the Q3 2025 Tesla Earnings Call, held 22 October 2025, HW3 came up again. The tone from Tesla leadership was noticeably more cautious than Musk's firm January commitment. Electrek quoted two Tesla executives:

CFO Vaibhav Taneja:

"We've not completely given up on hardware 3."

VP Ashok Elluswamy (FSD head) then announced:

"v14 Lite version for hardware 3. Probably expected in Q2 next year."

'Next year' in October 2025 meant 2026. Q2 2026 is April-June 2026, precisely the period in which this site is launched.

Two promises that can't both be true

These statements hurt Tesla in two ways:

1. A partial retraction of an earlier commitment

On 29 January 2025, Musk declared that Tesla would 'replace all HW3 computers in vehicles where FSD was purchased'. Nine months later, Tesla's own CFO says they've 'not completely given up on hardware 3'. That's the opposite of the January promise. A manufacturer openly walking back a prior commitment on an investor call puts itself in a position where neither promise can be treated as binding, or where both promises were made in good faith but simply not honoured. Either interpretation works in favour of customers who relied on the first promise.

2. 'Lite' isn't what anyone paid for

A 'v14 Lite' version is by its very nature a reduced variant. In 2019 Tesla sold the product 'Full Self-Driving', not 'Full Self-Driving Lite'. Delivering a smaller version with reduced functionality isn't performance of the original agreement. It's an attempted buy-off with an inferior substitute.

This isn't a theoretical distinction. Technical press has reported that Tesla builds the 'Lite' version by 'pruning' the neural network and 'quantizing' weights from 16-bit to 8-bit precision. The result is measurably worse: according to reports in March 2026, HW3 vehicles perform roughly 3.75 times worse on the most critical safety metric than AI4 vehicles.

We don't accept a stripped-down version

A core principle of hw3claim.nl is that HW3 owners who purchased the FSD package don't accept a stripped-down version. The promise was 'fully self-driving under nearly all circumstances, twice as safe as the average human driver'. A 'v14 Lite' that performs fundamentally worse than what new buyers receive isn't equivalent to that.

That Tesla admits the difference between the full product and the Lite version publicly, in its own Q3 2025 earnings call, makes it impossible for Tesla to later argue that the two versions are 'equivalent' or 'essentially the same product'.

Electrek's own read on the situation

Electrek closed its June 2025 report (four months after the January promise) with the observation that Tesla had still not communicated a plan. After the Q3 2025 call, Electrek wrote in November 2025:

"It appears that Tesla is hoping that HW3 owners will change vehicles."

In other words: Tesla's strategy appears to be to push HW3 owners onto the second-hand market without taking its own responsibility. That's exactly why this initiative exists, and why 'Lite' isn't enough.