Tesla recently took its Full Self-Driving program out of beta and into what it calls a “Supervised” stage, and now it’s also significantly lowering the price. Previously, it cost $12,000, but now if you want to add the option to a new Tesla, it is listed as costing $8,000 or if you already have Enhanced Autopilot on your car and want to upgrade to FSD, the cost has gone down from $6,000 to $2,000.
The price cut applies to Canada too, where the price has gone down from 16,000CAD to 11,000CAD.
The price fluctuations of Tesla’s FSD
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving option at one point reached $15,000, then the price dropped to $12,000 and now it’s been cut again.
Tesla also recently halved the price of the monthly FSD subscription, which has gone down from $199, which had been its price since the monthly subscription was introduced in July 2021, to $99. With the price cut, Tesla also made the monthly subscription available in Canada, where it costs 99CAD per month, which is equivalent to about $72 at current exchange rates.
It’s worth noting that with the new price cut, FSD is now back to about the same price as when it was originally introduced to a wider pool of drivers in October 2020. Back then, it was only available as a $3,000 option on top of the $5,000 you had to pay for Enhanced Autopilot. If you wanted to add FSD after you ordered the car, the cost of the option was $4,000, and it later went up to $5,000.
The highest price point was reached in September 2022, when the cost of FSD peaked at $15,000. Elon Musk said at the time that FSD was an investment and worth the money because once cars became fully autonomous, this would dramatically increase their value. However, FSD development has taken considerably longer than Musk’s initial estimates, and Tesla also came under regulatory scrutiny because of it.
The price of FSD was brought back down to $12,000 in September 2023, falling to its January 2022 level.
Tesla recently introduced the new Supervised stage of FSD, which started with version 12 and is still a kind of beta stage, but with a different name. It shows Tesla considers FSD to have evolved enough to warrant the name change, but as its name implies, it can’t be left unsupervised.
Tesla caught flak for calling its (still) semi-autonomous tech Full Self-Driving, even though it didn’t actually deliver on the name, and calling it Supervised could be a way of addressing that more so than signifying a new stage of its development. It now clearly lists in the feature’s description that it “does not make the vehicle autonomous.”
