Tesla cuts its ‘full self-driving’ subscription in half to $99/month

If you’re interested in using Tesla’s Full Self-Driving functionality (even though the company’s self-driving feature is a misnomer), you’ll be happy to learn that the subscription just got a whole lot more affordable. Tesla has charged a $199 monthly payment since FSD’s since inception in 2021, but on Friday, cut the price to $99 per month.

In March 2024, Tesla started offering a free 30-day trial of FSD to every eligible Tesla owner, an offer that’s still going on if you haven’t tried it out yet. If you’re already sold on the feature and don’t want to pay a monthly subscription, you can permanently add FSD to a Tesla vehicle for $12,000, a price that came down from $15,000 in 2022. At the current price, it would take 10 years to break even.

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Tesla now calls the feature “Full Self-Driving (Supervised),” partially acknowledging that it’s not intended to be totally autonomous and doesn’t actually propel the car down the road entirely on its own. Instead, FSD (Supervised) takes care of things like changing lanes, parking, autosteering on city streets, slowing at lights and traffic signs, and so on. A driver is still required to supervise the car’s driving should something go wrong.

Tesla’s FSD has had its fair share of problems. The company “recalled” 360,000 vehicles in February 2023 because the software was letting vehicles enter a stop sign-controlled intersection without stopping and letting vehicles exceed speed limits.

In 2020, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that FSD’s value “is probably somewhere in excess of $100,000.” In 2023, Musk called Teslas   appreciating assets and said the price of the self-driving feature would only increase.

If the price cut gets more people to sign up for FSD (Supervised), that could mean more data for the company to train its AI models on, which would hopefully make the feature more reliable.

To add FSD (Supervised) to your car, head to your Tesla app and click Upgrades. From there, tap Subscribe, check “Full Self-Driving Capability,” and hit Subscribe.