If you own a Tesla, you’ll likely know that adding the company’s “Full Self-Driving” feature, a NHTSA level 2 driver assistance feature, would come at a pretty hefty price: $10,000, to be exact. Now, the electronic driver aid will be available on a subscription basis for $99 or $199 per month, depending on the vehicle.
This information has been gleaned from Tesla’s support page, which has been updated to reflect the subscription pricing. To subscribe to the Full Self-Driving Feature, you’ll have to have Autopilot. If you have Basic Autopilot, you’ll be paying $199 per month. With Enhanced Autopilot, that’ll be $99 per month.
So, instead of paying $10,000 up front, you’ll be paying just under $1,200 or just under $2,400. You’ll already need to have the Full Self-Driving computer available on your Tesla; if that’s missing, you can choose to download it from the Schedule Service section of Tesla’s app. That hardware will cost an additional $1,500.
As a reminder, the Full Self-Driving feature has a misleading name. It’s only a level 2 driver assistance technology, which means that a human driver needs to be monitoring the system at all times — which is something Tesla notes with the following paragraph:
Note: These features are designed to become more capable over time; however the currently enabled features do not make the vehicle autonomous. The currently enabled features require a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.
So, Full Self-Driving is so named to reflect the technology it will one day become, not the technology it currently is.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been promising a subscription-based FSD service for a while, and the company made its first steps toward rolling it out on a wider scale by introducing over-the-air software updates for the FSD beta of version 9.
There are a few important things to note here, though. The subscription agreement on Tesla’s website notes that the company can increase the price of subscription at any time; owners will be given a one-month notice to determine whether or not they want to continue with FSD. They can also cancel at any time.