Tesla Drops Option to Pay One-Time Fee for Full Self-Driving (Supervised) Driver Assistance Software, CEO Elon Musk was announced Wednesday. From now on, the only way to access the feature will be through a monthly subscription.
The change represents a major break from how Tesla has sold access to its advanced driver assistance suite over the years. It’s also a decision that could have an impact on Tesla’s bottom line, Musk’s ability to unlock the full value of his $1 trillion pay package and the company’s ever-swirling legal troubles. And it comes as several other global automakers are making progress on their own advanced driver assistance systems in hopes of competing with Tesla.
Tesla has sold access to its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software suite — which still doesn’t make a car fully autonomous and requires human supervision — at various price points over the years. The starting price peaked at $15,000 in 2022, though more recently the company has been charging customers $8,000.
Tesla began offering access to the software through $199 per month subscription in 2021and dropped that price to just $99 per month in 2024. Musk often encouraged customers to pay the initial price, however, as he claimed the cost of FSD would rise dramatically as Tesla added capabilities.
But on Wednesday, Musk wrote in a post on X that Tesla will stop selling FSDs permanently starting February 14. He did not say whether Tesla plans to change the pricing structure for the subscription.
Musk also didn’t give an explanation for the change, but there are a few possible reasons. Musk and other Tesla executives have spoken publicly about how the adoption rate is lower than they had hoped. In October 2025, CFO Vaibhav Taneja he said only 12% of all Tesla customers have paid for FSD. The shift to a subscription-only model with a lower upfront cost could help boost those numbers, especially during what is expected to be a difficult first quarter for Tesla.
Boosting subscriptions would also bring Musk closer to meeting one of the key “product goals” needed to receive full payment of his new $1 trillion pay package. The company tasked him, among other things, with reaching “10 million active FSD subscriptions” (measured daily over a three-month period) before the end of 2035.
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Moving to a subscription-only model could also be a legal remedy.
For a decade, Musk and Tesla promoted the idea that customers were buying cars that had all the hardware needed to become autonomous vehicles, and that all the company had to do was improve the software. But that wasn’t true: Tesla has had to make several upgrades to its vehicles in recent years, and Musk himself said that a huge portion of existing owners (those with so-called “Hardware 3” vehicles) would likely need new hardware in their cars.
FSD was sold on the same promise. Customers who bought the software would eventually receive a software update that would make their cars fully autonomous. Tesla has yet to deliver on that promise.
Tesla is currently facing all kinds of legal problems related to these broken promises. In December, a judge ruled that the company engaged in misleading marketing around FSD (and its less capable system, Autopilot) and ordered the California DMV (which prosecuted the case) to suspend Tesla’s manufacturing and dealer licenses in the state for 30 days.
The DMV stayed the order and gave Tesla at least 60 days to comply by changing the names of those products or shipping software that fulfills the promise.
Tesla also faces a number of group action lawsuits over claims it made about the future autonomous capabilities of its vehicles. By removing the option to purchase FSD outright, the company could limit any potential liabilities in these lawsuits, should they go to trial.
Tesla’s FSD is still considered the most capable driver assistance software on the US market, but the company’s success hasn’t stopped competitors from trying to develop their own systems. Rivian recently unveiled its own efforts to launch FSD-style driver assistance software, starting with a significant geographic expansion of its hands-free driving feature. Ford and General Motors have their own hands-free systems. And the many rival automakers that Tesla competes with in China have developed their own solutions Some even offer driver assistance features as standard.
