Tesla has cut the price of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software subscription to $99 a month, from $199 a month, as the electric vehicle maker aims to boost adoption of its advanced driver assistance system ahead of first-quarter earnings.
The price cut comes a few weeks after Tesla released a free one-month trial of FSD for every US customer with a compatible Tesla. This trial is still ongoing. Formerly known as FSD Beta, Tesla now refers to the software as “Supervised FSD” to make it clear that the software doesn’t turn Teslas into autonomous vehicles, and human drivers still have to supervise the not-so-autonomous driving software.
FSD can handle some advanced driving tasks such as lane changing, navigating around vehicles and objects, driver navigation route tracking, and more.
The FSD price cut comes in the same week that Tesla released more tweaks to the latest version of the V12 software to some users. Tesla says the latest software upgrades FSD’s city-driving capability to run entirely on neural networks.
More FSD drivers don’t just mean more money for Tesla. It also means more video data, which the EV maker can use to train its neural networks and improve the product. Tesla may also want to use this data so it can make good on CEO Elon Musk’s recent promise to unveil a Tesla robot taxi in August.
Musk has urged the drivers to increase the value of their own cars by buying the software, and said in 2022 that Tesla is “it’s basically worth zeroIf it can’t develop self-driving technology. Actually, Tesla stock may be valued like a big tech company, but its margins keep reminding us that Tesla is still just a car company.
However, the greater accessibility of the FSD may increase the likelihood that drivers who do not do their duty to oversee the software will be enrolled and may find themselves unable to take over if something goes wrong.
Tesla doesn’t appear to have changed the cost of a one-time FSD purchase, which is still $12,000 in the US, but that price has also fluctuated over the past few years. In 2022, Tesla raised the cost of the FSD to $15,000 in North America, before dropping it back to its current price a year later.
The current price cut, which somewhat democratizes the software, is in stark contrast to Musk’s statement just four years ago on X, formerly Twitter, that the closer FSD gets to fully autonomous driving, the more its value will increase. Musk said at the time that the software could even cost “probably somewhere over $100,000.”
