Tesla is officially killing the option to purchase its Full Self-Driving (FSD) package upfront. CEO Elon Musk announced today that the automaker will stop selling FSD as a one-time option and will instead only offer it as a monthly subscription.
It marks a massive shift in Tesla’s strategy for the software, which Musk has famously claimed for years would become an “appreciating asset.”
For years, the main way to get access to Tesla’s self-driving promise was to pay a large upfront fee, ranging from $5,000 in the early days to a high of $15,000 in late 2022. The narrative was simple: buy it now, because the price is only going to go up as the software gets better and eventually enables your car to be a robotaxi worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Now, that era is over.Tesla started slashing prices in 2023 and they never went back up:
In a post on X (formerly Twitter) today, Musk announced the change:
Tesla will stop selling FSD after Feb 14. FSD will only be available as a monthly subscription thereafter.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
The move is significant as it detaches Tesla from its promise of delivering unsupervised self-driving to vehicles with FSD since every new FSD customer would only be subscribing for the month rather than buying the promise that their vehicle will eventually be unsupervised self-driving.
It essentially puts an end to FSD as a purchasable product attached to the vehicle.
A Turbulent History of FSD Pricing
This move comes after a roller-coaster few years for FSD pricing that directly contradicted Musk’s claims.
The CEO famously said that Tesla would keep increasing the price of FSD as the system became more capable. “The FSD price will continue to rise as the software gets closer to full self-driving capability with regulatory approval,” Musk said in 2020. He even went as far as saying that buying a Tesla with FSD was an “investment in the future” and that the cars were “appreciating assets.
Tesla seemed to stick to that plan for a while, raising the price to $10,000, then $12,000, and finally $15,000.
But in 2023, reality set in. As Tesla’s delivery numbers came under pressure and the FSD “take rate” (the percentage of buyers who opt for the software) reportedly plummeted, Tesla reversed course.
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