Tesla has was discontinued Autopilot, its main driver assistance system, as the company tries to boost adoption of a more advanced version of the technology it calls Full Self-Driving (Supervised).
The decision comes as the company faces a 30-day suspension of its manufacturing and dealer licenses in its largest US market, California. A judge ruled in December that Tesla engaged in misleading marketing by overstating the capabilities of Autopilot and FSD for years. The California Department of Motor Vehicles, which originally brought the case and has a say in the licenses, stayed the decision for 60 days to allow Tesla to comply with the withdrawal of the Autopilot name.
Autopilot was a combination of Traffic Aware Cruise Control, which maintains a set speed while keeping a distance from cars in front, and Autosteer, a lane-centering feature that could steer the car around corners.
Tesla’s online configuration website now states that the new cars now come standard with only Traffic Aware Cruise Control. It is unclear if current customers are affected.
The decision comes a week after the company said that starting February 14, it would stop charging a one-time fee of $8,000 for the FSD software. After that, customers will only be able to access FSD through a $99 monthly subscription — though Tesla CEO Elon Musk he wrote in a post on Thursday that the subscription price will increase as the software’s capabilities improve.
Musk believes Tesla’s newest cars will be able to drive “unsupervised”, saying that FSD developments will allow drivers to “be on your phone or sleep the whole way”. In December, he said a new version of the FSD allowed the former, although texting while driving is illegal in nearly all states.
On Thursday, Tesla rolled out the first robotaxi versions of its Model Y SUVs in Austin, Texas, with no security personnel in the cars. These vehicles use a more advanced version of the company’s driving software and are still followed by the company’s cars for supervision.
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Tesla released a beta version of its Full Self-Driving software in late 2020, but adoption has always lagged behind the expectations of executives like Musk. In October 2025, Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja, he said only 12% of all Tesla customers had paid for the software. Achieving “10 million active FSD subscriptions” by 2035 is one of the key “product targets” required for Musk to receive full payment of his new $1 trillion pay package.
Tesla first introduced Autopilot in the early 2010s after the talks broke down between Musk and Google to leverage technology being developed by the search giant’s then-nascent self-driving division (which eventually spun off into Waymo). Tesla made the driver assistance system standard all its vehicles in April 2019.
During Autopilot’s decade-plus existence, Tesla struggled to communicate the software’s capabilities. The company often overpromised and made the technology seem more capable than it was, causing some drivers to become overconfident about its abilities, which in turn led to hundreds of accidents and at least 13 deaths, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
