Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Moving to Subscription Only Soon
Tesla, which has a habit of frustrating customers by randomly adjusting the prices of its vehicles, will make a major change to its "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" system starting February 14.
Instead of a one-time purchase of $11,000, the technology will be available exclusively through a subscription at a monthly cost of $99. A 30-day free trial will still be offered.
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If you do the math, the change will pay off for Tesla customers who keep their vehicle for less than nine years and four months—in short, pretty much everyone. Not only that, but it will prove even cheaper when paying for the subscription separately instead of including the cost in the vehicle financing.
What Exactly Is Tesla’s Full Self-Driving?
Tesla and particularly CEO Elon Musk can’t stop praising the so-called "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" system while acknowledging at the same time that it doesn’t enable true autonomous driving. The key word here is “Supervised,” which takes away some of the confusion around the tech. As stated on the company’s website, “currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.”
Tesla uses billions of kilometres of anonymous real-world driving data to train its system to take care of the most stressful parts of daily driving. These include route navigation, steering, lane changes and parking. With “Actually Smart Summon,” for instance, your Tesla vehicle will navigate through parking lots and tight spaces to get to you.
No radar or lidar is used, with Tesla relying solely on cameras with 360-degree visibility that govern the operation of the vehicle’s numerous safety and collision-avoidance systems.
"Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" is available with all Tesla models including even the new, stripped-down Model Y Standard RWD that recently joined the Canadian lineup with a surprisingly low MSRP of $49,990.
