Tesla has lowered the price of its FSD subscription in the U.S.
Tesla just dropped its FSD subscription pricing dramatically in the U.S., lowering the cost from $199 to $99 per month. However, not everyone is thrilled with the new pricing.
For owners who bought the Enhanced Autopilot package for $6,000 USD, Tesla offered a lower-priced FSD subscription of $99, instead of $199. However, with this new FSD price reduction, EAP owners are no longer receiving a discount.
FSD Subscription Expansion
Currently, the FSD subscription is only available in the U.S., but plans for expansion are underway. Tesla's Rohan Patel recently announced that the subscription will soon be available in Canada, alongside the introduction of an annual plan for Premium Connectivity.
This expansion into the Canadian market is anticipated to follow a similar pricing strategy, adjusted for the currency exchange rate, possibly setting the cost at approximately $140 CAD per month.
Update: Tesla has just announced that FSD subscriptions are now available in Canada! What’s even more surprising is the unexpectedly low subscription price of $99 CAD. Tesla took to X to announce the availability in Canada but unfortunately didn’t reveal any additional information regarding the subscriptions.
Is Buying FSD Still Worth It?
Despite the lowered subscription price, the outright purchase price for FSD remains steep at $12,000. This price point equates to subscribing to the service for over 10 years. Given that the average length of car ownership in the U.S. is about 8 years, this makes the current price of buying FSD unattractive to most. The saving grace of buying FSD is that you know what you're paying for the life of the vehicle and can avoid any potential subscription price increases.
Temporary Reduction or Long-term Strategy?
Tesla has not confirmed whether the price reduction is a temporary promotional tactic or a permanent adjustment. The timing coincides with Tesla's release of FSD v12 and its trial offer, suggesting that the company is keen on encouraging more drivers to experience FSD. This approach not only boosts user engagement but also accelerates the volume of data Tesla can collect to improve the system.
FSD With Referral Credits
Although Tesla hasn't adjusted the price of buying FSD, it is tweaking its referral program to accommodate the new price. Three months of FSD are now available through Tesla's referral program for 6,000 credits, reduced from the previous 12,000 credits.
Tesla's reduction in FSD in the U.S. and its planned expansion into Canada reflect a strategic initiative to make FSD more accessible and financially attractive to a broader audience. There's no doubt this change will increase the number of FSD subscriptions, but it'll be interesting to see how much. To break even, Tesla would need to double the number of subscriptions, but they likely have their eyes set much higher.
If you currently subscribe to FSD, Tesla has automatically reduced future payments to the lower $99 price point.
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On Sunday, Tesla started rolling out Full Self-Driving (Supervised) V12.3.6, the latest version of its FSD software. This update includes the highly anticipated new Autopark and High Fidelity Park Assist feature for additional vehicles. FSD v12.3.6 replaces v12.3.5 which had only been rolled out to a small portion of the fleet.
The new Autopark (tap to park) and High Fidelity Park Assist features are now available for vehicles with ultrasonic sensors (USS). Since October 2022, all Model 3 and Model Y vehicles no longer include ultrasonic sensors, instead relying solely on Tesla Vision to provide Autopilot, Park Assist, and Autopark features. However, the vision-based Autopark has been limited to the U.S. and Canada so far.
New Autopark
When driving at low speed, the new Autopark highlights potential parking spaces allowing the driver to pick their preferred spot. Tesla vehicles with ultrasonic sensors (USS) can now take advantage of the new Autopark feature, which is a significant improvement over the previous iteration.
Although the new Autopark feature is expanding to vehicles with USS, it appears to still be geographically limited to the U.S. and Canada. We expect Tesla to continue the feedback loop and release the feature in Europe and other regions in a future update.
Vehicles without USS outside of North America have never had Autopark of any form since they don’t support the older Autopark version that relies on USS and have yet to receive this latest revision of the feature.
For vehicles with the Intel-based infotainment unit, the visuals will look like the video below, where it doesn’t display a 3D environment of the vehicle’s surroundings. Instead, the visualization just highlights parking spaces available. However, the limitation for Intel vehicles is just in the visualization itself, the vehicle is just as aware of its surroundings as vehicles that display 3D renderings of objects on the screen.
With Tesla update 2024.3.25 (FSD v12.3.6), Tesla is also releasing High Fidelity Park Assist features to vehicles with ultrasonic sensors. However, as initially suspected, it’s limited to vehicles with the most recent infotainment processor that includes the Ryzen chip (MCU 3). Unfortunately, Intel Atom based vehicles don’t include the 3D visuals of High Fidelity Park Assist.
The feature provides drivers with a 360-degree 3D reconstruction of their vehicles’ surroundings while parking while traveling at low speeds. It even accurately displays lane markers in parking lots helping drivers visualize the environment around them when parking. The feature was added as a late addition to Tesla’s 2023 holiday update. However, at the time, it was limited to vehicles without ultrasonic sensors (USS).
For vehicles that have ultrasonic sensors, users will have a choice to either continue using their vehicle with USS sensors that display exact distances to objects or use the new High Fidelity Park Assist feature and forego the display of distances.
We were hoping that when Tesla finally released HiFi Park Assist to vehicles with USS, it would merge the two features and display the updated visuals with distance measurements, however, that is not the case in this update.
For owners with USS, the new Park Assist option is located under Controls > Autopilot and allows you to choose between “Standard” or “Tesla Vision.” Tesla Vision being the new HiFi Park Assist and Standard representing the USS version with arcs and measurements.
Tesla’s director of Autopilot, Ashok Elluswamy had previously set expectations and stated that HiFi Park Assist would “eventually” go to vehicles with ultrasonic sensors back in December 2023. The new Park Assist feature is available in various regions around the world, including North America and most of Europe.
Tesla continues to double down on vision and Musk revealed that it's becoming “very clear that the vision-based approach with end-to-end neural networks is the right solution for scalable autonomy”.
Tesla has started offering Enhanced Autopilot (EAP) in China via a subscription starting at 699 yuan per month — equivalent to about $98.5 USD. It’s the first time Tesla owners in the country will have access to features such as auto lane change, Autopark, Smart Summon, and others.
It’s not clear whether Tesla will begin to offer EAP as a subscription in other regions as well.
The move is seen as the first step towards the expansion of Tesla’s full self driving to China as other markets outside North America wait for the arrival of the FSD software. Yesterday, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk said the version 12 is “ready for supervised FSD in LHD countries” while RHD countries such as Australia, UK or Japan “will take a bit longer”.
FSD in China
China giant Baidu announced last Monday that it will provide all Tesla vehicles in China its latest version of Baidu Maps starting in May.
This week, Tesla celebrated its 10th anniversary in the Chinese Market where it has a total of 1.7 million owners — Tesla’s second largest market. Elon Musk recently tweeted that Tesla may soon offer full self-driving in China by saying “It may be possible very soon”.
FSD in Europe
On Friday, the Senior Advisor of the Swedish Transport Transportation, Rikard Fredriksson, shared on LinkedIn that he had been demoed the FSD technology in Germany with a Tesla employee. The moment marks the first official use of the assisted driving software in Europe.
Impressive smooth and natural driving
LinkedIn Post by Rikard Fredriksson after the FSD Demo in Germany
In the recent earnings call, Elon Musk said Tesla has over 300 million miles that has been driven with FSD v12 since it was launched just last month. He added that it's becoming “very clear that the vision-based approach with end-to-end neural networks is the right solution for scalable autonomy”.
Tesla said it has been investing in the hardware and software ecosystems necessary to achieve vehicle autonomy and a ride-hailing service. The company is confident that it can establish a scalable and profitable autonomous driving business by employing a vision-only architecture.
Tesla has recently reduced the pricing of its “Full Self-Driving” software in the US, from $12,000 to $8,000, and in Canada from CA$16,000 to $11,000. This price reduction follows a 50% cut in the subscription fee announced earlier this month.
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