A specific facial expression comes to mind while reading this, and it's:
I truly do hope that our current HW4 cars are fully capable of some form of unsupervised FSD. As it stands, I don't plan on buying another car for a minimum of another 5 to 7 years and potentially more depending on how well it holds up in the battery degradation department. While FSD is great today, it would really suck if we don't get unsupervised and are still required to pay full price for FSD with zero path or option to upgrade the hardware to allow for unsupervised.
Just the fact that Tesla is already currently aware of the need for better camera cleaning systems and actively implementing them in their robotaxi fleet but still doesn't allow retrofits for consumer vehicles is a bad sign, imo. Even something as simple as the fact that they aren't offering retrofits of the front bumper camera to 2024 Highland models is a bad sign to me.
If HW5 is released and it truly is in the simplest sense "impossible" to retrofit, then that would be terrible. But I guess they have some form of confidence in HW4 seeing as that is what they are upgrading current HW3 owners to (unless they aren't).