A Dutch Tesla owner who paid €6,400 for Full Self-Driving in 2019 has launched a collective claim initiative targeting the company over its failure to deliver equivalent FSD capabilities on Hardware 3 vehicles.
The claim comes a few days after the Netherlands became the first European country to approve the software exclusively for newer hardware.
Mischa Sigtermans, who bought one of the first Model 3s delivered in the Netherlands in 2019, announced the campaign on X on Monday in a post that has surpassed 100,000 views.
He built a website — hw3claim.nl — to organise affected owners across Europe.
“Tesla owes me €6,400. And if you’re a HW3 + FSD owner, they owe you too,” Sigtermans wrote. “I waited 7 years. SEVEN years! Last week the RDW finally approved FSD here. And for HW3 owners? Nothing. Radio silence. ~4 million cars worldwide.”
He said the initiative attracted 36 sign-ups in its first 24 hours without advertising. Sign-ups have since been opened to all EU countries.
“The hardware limitation isn’t Dutch. It’s the same everywhere,” Sigtermans wrote in a follow-up post.
What Happened
The Dutch vehicle authority RDW granted type approval for Tesla‘s FSD (Supervised) system on April 10, making the Netherlands the first European country to permit the software on public roads.
However, the approval covers only vehicles equipped with Tesla‘s latest AI4 hardware — also known as Hardware 4 — which has been installed in new vehicles since late 2023.
Owners of earlier vehicles built with Hardware 3, produced between approximately April 2019 and late 2023 across Model 3, S, X, and Y, cannot activate the approved version of FSD.
Tesla has instead announced a stripped-down variant called “v14 Lite” for HW3 vehicles, which the company said in Q3 2025 would arrive in Q2 2026 with reduced capabilities.
Approximately four million vehicles worldwide are affected.
What Tesla Promised
The claim rests on Tesla‘s original marketing language to Dutch buyers. According to archived content cited on the website’s evidence page, Tesla‘s Dutch product page in 2019 stated: “Every Tesla is equipped with the hardware needed in the future to make the vehicle fully self-driving in almost all circumstances.”
The Dutch configurator in 2019 listed specific features under “Full Self-Driving Capability” with a timeline of “later this year,” including traffic light and stop sign recognition and urban autonomous driving.
The only disclaimer covered regulatory approval and reliability — not hardware limitations or future replacement.
FSD was sold as a one-time purchase in the Netherlands, priced between €5,300 and €7,500 depending on the timing of the order.
As EV reported on Monday, FSD’s first European drives drew praise from Dutch owners on Amsterdam’s narrow streets — but all of those early testers were driving AI4 vehicles.
Tesla’s Shifting Position
Musk has acknowledged the hardware gap.
On the Q4 2024 earnings call on January 29, 2025, CEO Elon Musk said: “The truth is that we will need to replace all HW3 computers in vehicles where FSD was purchased.” He added that “that is going to be painful and difficult, but we’ll get it done.”
Musk specified the free replacement would only apply to owners who purchased FSD outright — not monthly subscribers.
However, by the Q3 2025 earnings call in October, Tesla‘s position had shifted. Instead of a mass hardware retrofit, the company announced “v14 Lite” — a pruned, lower-parameter software version for HW3.
Musk told HW3 owners on that call: “We will definitely take care of you guys,” adding that he himself drives a HW3 car.
Separately, Tesla VP of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed publicly on X in August 2024 that HW3 runs a “relatively smaller model” than AI4, with workarounds that emulate operations natively supported on the newer hardware.
A Tesla patent filed in the United States acknowledges that the workaround method used to run FSD on HW3 can render perception components “inoperable” for autonomous driving.
The Performance Gap
HW3 uses Tesla‘s custom FSD Computer with approximately 144 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of neural processing power.
AI4, introduced in late 2023, delivers approximately 500 TOPS or more — roughly three to five times the capability — along with higher-resolution cameras and improved memory.
The HW2.5 Precedent
The claim also points to Tesla‘s own precedent.
When the company recognised in 2019 that its earlier HW2.5 hardware was insufficient for the FSD features it had sold, it offered free upgrades to HW3 for all FSD purchasers.
That programme set the expectation among buyers that insufficient hardware would be remedied at Tesla’s expense.
No equivalent programme has been announced for HW3 to AI4 upgrades.
Legal Context
The Dutch initiative is part of a broader wave of legal challenges to Tesla‘s FSD marketing globally.
In the United States, class action lawsuits including LoSavio and Matsko were certified in 2025 over allegations that Tesla misled buyers about HW3’s capabilities and FSD’s timeline.
In China, HW3 FSD owners filed suit in Beijing in 2025, with an estimated one million or more vehicles potentially affected. In Australia, a separate class action is ongoing over FSD and Autopilot marketing claims.
The hw3claim.nl website states that no legal filing has been made yet.
The initiative is currently collecting sign-ups to build leverage for negotiations with Tesla or, if necessary, a formal class action.
Sign-up is free, and the site says participants bear no financial risk.
EU Rollout and Italy’s Wait-and-See
As EV reported earlier on Tuesday, the FSD approval is expected to be discussed at the European Union level next month.
The RDW has notified the European Commission that it intends to present Tesla‘s file at the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles, which has meetings scheduled for May 5 and June 30.
Tesla‘s European account has stated it anticipates “a possible EU-wide approval during the summer,” though the Commission has not committed to a timeline.
Italy’s Transport Ministry told a Tesla owner this week that it is not taking any decision on FSD until the EU-level discussions have concluded, saying “no decision has yet been taken at the European level as provided for in the month of May, when a joint analysis of the proposed solution will be carried out by the Commission and the Member States.”
