Tesla nixes free Autopilot before increasing FSD subscription price

The free Autopilot that Tesla has been giving away with its vehicles for a while now is no more. Tesla is betting the house on future FSD subscription revenue and has nixed the Autopilot option from its free driver-assist feature options.

All that new Tesla cars come with now is a rather basic speed adjustment feature that is pompously known as Traffic-Aware Cruise Control that sometimes results in phantom braking. This means that people would have to shell out $99/month even if they just want the Autosteer option that was given for free before.

For comparison, a RAV4 that costs twenty grand less than a Premium Model Y comes with Toyota's Safety Sense that includes a laundry list of driver-assist options, including autosteering, as well as pedestrian or road sign detection.

Elon Musk, who will be presiding over a less than pleasant Q4 sales and 2025 revenue result conference on January 28, may be trying to preempt possible bad operating income news by hyping future revenue.

Tesla FSD subscription price

Tesla, for instance, just introduced truly unsupervised Model Y robotaxi operation in Austin without a safety monitor employee in the car. The move comes shortly before said quarterly results conference but now Elon Musk has chimed in informing that Tesla owners will have to pay more for this branch of its driver-assist software than they are paying now for the FSD (Supervised) option available to the public. "The massive value jump is when you can be on your phone or sleeping for the entire ride," claims Elon.

Until February 14, Tesla will offer both the $8,000 FSD purchase and the $99/month subscription options. On Valentine's Day, however, those who want to use FSD will be left with only the subscription option that may go up in price when Tesla rolls out the FSD (Unsupervised) branch to owners of newer Teslas with HW4 computer.

This rather transparent attempt to juice up revenue numbers may backfire at some point, as Tesla will need seven years to start earning from a subscription compared to a purchase at current prices. Many a Tesla owner may have ditched the brand or car until then, or they may simply pay for FSD intermittently when they feel they need it for longer trips, so it remains to be seen if this subscription-only model will pay off for Tesla after the upcoming FSD price increase.

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