Tesla offers the ability to buy or lease their vehicles. However, leasing a vehicle came with a major shortcoming. Leasing a Tesla meant you couldn’t buy out your lease at the end of the contract. Instead, you were required to return the car to Tesla, leaving you the option of leasing another or purchasing a new vehicle.
For the first time in Tesla’s history, lease buyouts are being introduced for the Model 3 and Model Y and are returning for the Model S and Model X as well.
Lease buyout now available for new S3XY + @cybertruck leases in the US
Tesla’s social media team took to X to announce that the company is going to allow lease buyouts in the United States for the first time. As Tesla works with its financing partners, we expect this option to roll out to other regions too. These lease buyouts include all its vehicles, including the Cybetruck.
A lease buyout is an end-of-contract option that lets you purchase the vehicle for its residual value, allowing you to keep the car instead of returning it. It’s a great way to test-drive a car long-term, giving you the flexibility to decide if it’s the right fit before committing to ownership. For many new car buyers, it offers a lower-risk alternative to buying a vehicle outright, making it an attractive option for those seeking less upfront commitment.
Offer to be Extended to Current Leases
The price of the buyout is normally determined at the signing of the lease contract - rather than at the end of the lease. While Tesla initially said that the buyout of leases is only for new leases - that quickly changed. Tesla is confirming that end-of-lease clauses will become available for current leasees over the next few weeks. Leasees will be able to reach out directly through the Tesla app to get buyout quotes - or reach out to their financial institutions if the lease was done through a third-party financer.
If you’ve been hesitant to lease a Tesla due to the inability to buy it out, stay tuned—this teaser might just change the game. For many, it’s the final nudge needed to take the plunge and lease a new Tesla. With the added perks of the updated referral program and other incentives running right now, now is an excellent time to buy a new Tesla.
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The map above compares Tesla's current geofence with their potential expansion in yellow.
Not a Tesla App
With Tesla’s first major expansion of the Robotaxi Geofence now complete and operational, they’ve been hard at work with validation in new locations - and some are quite the drive from the current Austin Geofence.
Validation fleet vehicles have been spotted operating in a wider perimeter around the city, from rural roads in the west end to the more complex area closer to the airport. Tesla mentioned during their earnings call that the Robotaxi has already completed 7,000 miles in Austin, and it will expand its area of operation to roughly 10 times what it is now. This lines up with the validation vehicles we’ve been tracking around Austin.
Based on the spread of the new sightings, the potential next geofence could cover a staggering 450 square miles - a tenfold increase from the current service area of roughly 42 square miles.
If Tesla decides to expand into these new areas, it would represent a tenfold increase over their current geofence, matching Tesla’s statement. The new area would cover approximately 10% of the 4,500-square-mile Austin metropolitan area. If Tesla can offer Robotaxi services in that entire area, it would prove they can tackle just about any city in the United States.
In the map below, the blue icons are sightings of Tesla validation vehicles, while the yellow map area represents their potential expansion. The map overlays Tesla’s phases 1 and 2 and compares them to Waymo’s first two phases. You can toggle each one by tapping the icon at the top left and choosing which geofences you’d like to view.
From Urban Core to Rural Roads
The locations of the validation vehicles show a clear intent to move beyond the initial urban and suburban core and prepare the Robotaxi service for a much wider range of uses.
In the west, validation fleet vehicles have been spotted as far as Marble Falls - a much more rural environment that features different road types, higher speed limits, and potentially different challenges.
In the south, Tesla has been expanding towards Kyle, which is part of the growing Austin-San Antonio suburban corridor spanning Highway 35. San Antonio is only 80 miles (roughly a 90-minute drive) away, and could easily become part of the existing Robotaxi area if Tesla obtains regulatory approval there.
In the East, we haven’t spotted any new validation vehicles. This is likely because Tesla’s validation vehicles originate from Giga Texas, which is located East of Austin. We won’t really know if Tesla is expanding in this direction until they start pushing past Giga Texas and toward Houston.
Finally, there have been some validation vehicles spotted just North of the new expanded boundaries, meaning that Tesla isn’t done in that direction either. This direction consists of the largest suburban areas of Austin, which have so far not been serviced by any form of autonomous vehicle.
Rapid Scaling
This new, widespread validation effort confirms what we already know. Tesla is pushing for an intensive period of public data gathering and system testing in a new area, right before conducting geofence expansions. The sheer scale of this new validation zone tells us that Tesla isn’t taking this slowly - the next step is going to be a great leap instead, and they essentially confirmed this during this Q&A session on the recent call. The goal is clearly to bring the entire Austin Metropolitan area into the Robotaxi Network.
While the previous expansion showed off just how Tesla can scale the network, this new phase of validation testing is a demonstration of just how fast they can validate and expand their network. The move to validate across rural, suburban, and urban areas simultaneously shows their confidence in these new Robotaxi FSD builds.
Eventually, all these improvements from Robotaxi will make their way to customer FSD builds sometime in Q3 2025, so there is a lot to look forward to.
For years, the progress of Tesla’s FSD has been measured by smoother turns, better lane centering, and more confident unprotected left turns. But as the system matures, a new, more subtle form of intelligence is emerging - one that shifts its attention to the human nuances of navigating roads. A new video posted to X shows the most recent FSD build, V13.2.9, demonstrating this in a remarkable real-world scenario.
Toll Booth Magic
In the video, a Model Y running FSD pulls up to a toll booth and smoothly comes to a stop, allowing the driver to handle payment. The car waits patiently as the driver interacts with the attendant. Then, at the precise moment the toll booth operator finishes the transaction and says “Have a great day”, the vehicle starts moving, proceeding through the booth - all without any input from the driver.
If you notice, there’s no gate here at this toll booth. This interaction all happened naturally with FSD.
While the timing was perfect, the FSD wasn’t listening to the conversation for clues (maybe one day, with Grok?) The reality, as explained by Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP of AI, is even more impressive.
It can see the transaction happening using the repeater & pillar cameras. Hence FSD proceeds on its own when the transaction is complete 😎
FSD is simply using the cameras on the side of the vehicle to watch the exchange between the driver and attendant. The neural network has been trained on enough data that it can visually recognize the conclusion of a transaction - the exchange of money or a card and the hands pulling away - and understands that this is the trigger to proceed.
The Bigger Picture
This capability is far more significant than just a simple party trick. FSD is gaining the ability to perceive and navigate a world built for humans in the most human-like fashion possible.
If FSD can learn what a completed toll transaction looks like, it’s an example of the countless other complex scenarios it’ll be able to handle in the future. This same visual understanding could be applied to navigating a fast-food drive-thru, interacting with a parking garage attendant, passing through a security checkpoint, or boarding a ferry or vehicle train — all things we thought that would come much later.
These human-focused interactions will eventually become even more useful, as FSD becomes ever more confident in responding to humans on the road, like when a police officer tells a vehicle to go a certain direction, or a construction worker flags you through a site. These are real-world events that happen every day, and it isn’t surprising to see FSD picking up on the subtleties and nuances of human interaction.
This isn’t a pre-programmed feature for a specific toll booth. It is an emergent capability of the end-to-end AI neural nets. By learning from millions of videos across billions of miles, FSD is beginning to build a true contextual understanding of the world. The best part - with a 10x context increase on its way, this understanding will grow rapidly and become far more powerful.
These small, subtle moments of intelligence are the necessary steps to a truly robust autonomous system that can handle the messy, unpredictable nature of human society.
![No Driver Needed: Tesla FSD Stops at Toll, Waits for Driver to Pay and Takes Off Again [VIDEO]](https://www.notateslaapp.com/img/containers/article_images/fsd-beta/fsd-toll-booth.webp/57e008aff60c6c1e998e304eca200cda/fsd-toll-booth.jpg)
