If you own a HW3 car, Wednesday night is your night. Tesla reports earnings Wednesday, and shareholders have been voting all week on which questions get asked on the call. One of the most backed questions on the list is the one you have been asking all year. When do HW3 owners get the upgrade? You know the history. Tesla promised HW3 owners a path back in April, a discounted trade in or a computer and camera swap. Six months later there is still no price and no date, and v14 Lite is where your cars stop. The voting closes Tuesday at 4 PM Eastern. Wednesday night Tesla either answers it in front of everyone, or skips it in front of everyone. So, HW3 owners. What do you need to hear Wednesday? A real date? A price you can plan around? Or are you done waiting on soon?

HW3 owners already know the trade up math changed this year. Transfers ended March 31, outright purchases ended February 14. Here is what that actually means if you trade up. The FSD you bought stays with the old car. Owners paid 8,000 dollars at the last price, some 12,000 or 15,000 earlier, and none of that follows you to the new car. You cannot buy it again either. The new car puts you on 99 dollars a month, which is 1,188 dollars a year, every year, with no buyout at the end of it. That is on top of the trade itself. The car you trade in takes its normal depreciation hit, and the FSD line in your math flips from an asset you owned to a subscription you rent. Waiting is the other side of it, and it costs nothing upfront. Tesla promised owners who bought FSD a free computer and camera upgrade. But there is still no date, and Musk has floated skipping to the next generation computer around mid 2027. Meanwhile v15 is headed to HW4 cars with no Lite version announced for HW3, and unsupervised is targeted around the second quarter of 2027 on HW4 hardware. And waiting looks worse outside the US. In Australia, HW3 owners paid for FSD years ago, some at 10,100 Australian dollars, and still cannot use it at all. FSD there runs on HW4 cars only, and Tesla Australia still gives no confirmed timing for HW3, not even Lite. Most American HW3 owners wait with Lite in hand. Australian HW3 owners wait with no FSD at all. So the choice is not just Lite versus new. It is a free upgrade with no date against a new car plus a subscription that never becomes yours. HW3 owners, if you priced a trade up since transfer ended, what gap did Tesla quote you?

HW3 owners waited more than a year on v12 for this. When Lite arrived in the summer, it was real progress. Smoother driving, and features HW3 had never had. It also came with owner reports of cars throwing red hands and refusing to drive until the computer cooled down. Now v14.3 Lite is here. So where does yours still make you take over?

HW3 owners keep asking whether v14 Lite is the real thing or a consolation prize. Months into it, here is the honest answer. It is genuinely good, and it is not the same car HW4 owners drive. What it does best is everyday driving. Merges, forks, unprotected lefts, roundabouts, pedestrians, traffic lights, cut ins. Smoother steering, fewer false slowdowns, steadier lane centering. It parks, unparks, reverses, and lets you pick where it drops you, with Speed Profiles always on. That is a real jump from the v12 branch HW3 sat on for so long, and it is distilled from the same HW4 v14 brain, not a separate old codebase. Where it falls short is the hard stuff. Reactions trail the full version, and the gap shows in complex edge cases, not on an easy commute. HW3 misses Automatic Collision Evasion, the feature that steers around a crash while you are driving manually. It misses the Mad Max profile and the new Smart Summon. Older S and X cars on Intel chips miss even more, no start from park, no arrival options, no reversing. Early Lite builds even had a pulsing feel owners flagged. Tesla fixed that in later builds, but it showed how tight the fit is. That tight fit is the whole story. HW3 has about one eighth the memory bandwidth of HW4, and 1.2 megapixel cameras against HW4 5 megapixel. The modern FSD model simply does not fit on HW3 without being shrunk. That is why Lite exists, and why Musk said on the Q1 call that HW3 cannot reach unsupervised, no matter how good the software gets. V15 is headed to HW4 cars, with no Lite version announced for HW3. So can Tesla close the gap? For supervised daily driving, mostly yes, and Lite should keep improving as HW4 teaches it. For the full HW4 experience, no. Unsupervised on this hardware is off the table, and the feature gap will widen as v15 lands. That leaves HW3 owners three real options. Keep driving Lite, which is good and still getting better. Wait for the retrofit Musk promised to owners who bought FSD, computer and cameras both, though timing and the exact hardware are still unannounced, and he has floated skipping to the next generation computer around mid 2027. Or trade in for an HW4 car, which is the only route to unsupervised and the Q2 2027 date Ashok gave on the last call. So HW3 owners, what is your move? Stay on Lite, wait for the retrofit, or trade up?

$3.5 trillion on the table and Elon Musk cannot sit in the talks. Tesla and SpaceX just moved their merger from a podcast tease five weeks ago to special committees of independent directors tonight. Musk said it himself on the SpaceX earnings call. Shareholders asked Tesla and SpaceX to explore it. SpaceX is worth about $2 trillion. Tesla is worth about $1.45 trillion. Put Tesla and SpaceX together and it would be the biggest merger ever. Musk runs both companies. That is exactly why he is recused from the talks as a conflicted party. No terms agreed. No merger guaranteed. It could still die in committee. But if it survives, Tesla shareholders and SpaceX shareholders get the vote. And Tesla reports earnings tomorrow afternoon.