Tesla leaves loyal FSD customers in the dark, with financial regrets

Among all the hype surrounding Tesla’s imminent launch of supervised full self-driving (FSD) in Australia, there is one group of loyal Tesla customers being left in the dark, and with financial regrets: The owners of older Tesla vehicles who purchased FSD long ago and have not heard anything at all from Tesla for years.

I should know, because I got sucked in by Elon Musk’s promises and hype around FSD and decided to purchase FSD for my Model 3 a month after getting it in September, 2019. I remember watching the original Model 3 reveal event in March 2016 and thinking to myself, one day I will be able to summon my car to pick me up from the train station. Ha!

They say hindsight is 20:20, and my FSD blunder is a great example of what could have been. The Tesla share price closed on October 28, 2019 at $21.85 USD ($31.62 AUD using ATO’s historical exchange rate), and the stock price at time of writing is $333 USD or $505 AUD with current exchange rates.

If I had taken my $A8,500 that I spent on FSD and invested instead in Tesla stock, I would currently have nearly $136,000 to cash in. Wow! If I was a stock market genius and cashed out at the 52-week high on December 2024 ($488 USD, $770 AUD) this figure would be a crazy $207,000 – which is pretty depressing to be honest.

At first the figures seemed unbelievable, but I triple checked everything and am certain they are correct. Just in case you were wondering like me, that is enough to order 2 brand new fully loaded Model 3 Performance with every single possible option ticked. I never use emoji’s in my articles, but 😱 perfectly describes how I feel about those numbers. 

Thankfully, my initial $1,500 reservation fee paid on March 31, 2016 was not such a waste, as the share price only grew by 20% in the 3.5 years to September 2019. 

I was one of those fans who lined up outside the Tesla St Leonards store at around 5am to pay my reservation without actually seeing the Model 3 yet. I was certainly not as keen as Andreas Stephens, who famously camped out for 48 hours to secure his place at the front of the line. 

You can’t see me in the picture below, but I was standing roughly where the big red arrow is, in about 20th place. I headed to work afterwards and watched the global reveal event several hours later.

Trying to forget about the money aspect, Tesla has not sent me any information about when I might actually be able to use the full self-driving I paid for, ever. The first email mentioning FSD was February 2024, when they told me I could transfer my FSD package to a new Tesla. 

Rather than Tesla, all information I have about FSD is from reading articles or listening to podcasts on the topic. What I know currently is that owners of older Tesla vehicles with hardware 3 (HW3) such as me are unlikely to ever receive a free hardware upgrade, leaving us in a predicament as this excellent article on the situation explains.

During Tesla’s Q3 2024 earnings call, Elon Musk did answer the question of HW3 capability by saying, “There is some chance that HW3 does not achieve a safety level that allows for unsupervised FSD,” and “We will make sure we take care of those who bought FSD on HW3.”

However, I find this hard to believe given all the FSD promises from Elon over the years that have turned out not to be true.

Instead of free upgrades, Tesla’s plan seems to rely on encouraging us to buy a new Tesla and transfer our FSD package, so they can ultimately ignore the problem and never have to offer the hardware upgrade we deserve. 

I now take everything Tesla and Elon say about FSD with an Uluru-sized grain of salt, so I am definitely not planning to buy a new Tesla and fall into the same trap again.

My hope is that someone, maybe me, will initiate a class action lawsuit against Tesla to get them to offer us something. I have used the auto lane change feature on my car thousands of times, so perhaps a partial refund and downgrade to Enhanced Autopilot, which includes auto lane change, is the best I could hope for.

Someone in the UK successfully challenged Tesla on their full self-driving claims and was awarded a full refund with interest. I am also aware of an ongoing class action in Australia which includes concerns around phantom braking, inaccurate range and autopilot claims, but the lawsuit relates only to newer vehicles from 2021 equipped with Tesla Vision.

Tim Eden

Tim has 20 years experience in the IT industry including 14 years as a network engineer and site reliability engineer at Google Australia. He is an EV and renewable energy enthusiast who is most passionate about helping people understand and adopt these technologies.