Tesla FSD Subscription: Price and Release Date Expectations

Elon Musk said back in December 2020 that a FSD subscription would be made available next year. He has recently said that it’s coming this month and that it won’t be tied to the wider release of the FSD v9 beta which is expected in May or June. You can probably guess why these two features have similar timelines as Tesla expects FSD v9 to help sell the FSD subscriptions. The new FSD v9 release is also expected to have brand new vector-space visualizations.

We’re now in May and the FSD subscription should be falling upon us any day now. In our initial reporting of the FSD subscription, we talked about why it was smart for Tesla to also offer a FSD subscription in addition to a one-time purchase package. You can read more about those reasons here, but they mostly have to do with the hefty price tag of $10,000, which is a tough pill to swallow for most and also that there are some instances where buying the FSD package outright doesn't make sense, for example if you’re leasing your car.

Here’s what to expect in Tesla’s announcement

The average new car length ownership in the US is 8.4 years. The FSD package currently costs $10,000 USD. So if you take the cost of the package and divide it by the length of car ownership, you get a price of $99/month.

Now, there are probably a few reasons why Tesla wouldn’t want to create a $99/month FSD option, even though it’s a very attractive price.

First, if Tesla were to release a $99/month option, they’d be sure to annoy a whole lot of loyal supporters who spent $10,000 up front when they bought their cars and only had a fraction of the FSD features available. Secondly, Tesla would much rather you buy the FSD package up front instead of paying for it monthly. By doing that, not only do they have $10k to invest into resources right away, but they also essentially got you to commit to pay for FSD every month for 8-plus years.

So what is a good price? $149 seems plausible. For drivers who have leased their cars for three-years then it’d be a total cost of about $5,300 over the course of the three-years instead of their only other alternative right now, which is the full $10,000 package. This may tip the boat in Tesla’s favor for many.

You can certainly bet that Tesla is closely analyzing the percentage of buyers who currently buy the FSD package today and how many of those buyers they would lose if they were to offer a monthly subscription. The answer to that question lies in whether they would make more through FSD subscriptions than what they’d lose in upfront payments.

If we look at the possibility of a $199/month subscription then we’re looking at someone paying $7,200 over three-years, which seems just way too close to the full price of $10,000 to make sense. That’d be paying over $20k over that 8 year period.

Now, if Tesla were a traditional company, I would feel pretty comfortable with expecting a $149/month FSD subscription becoming available this month. But if there’s one thing that Tesla has taught us over the years, is that there is always a price early adopters pay.

The price of Tesla’s cars has dropped dramatically in some cases. Some folks paid more for an AWD Model 3 then what the Performance model ended up costing later on. Elon Musk has often commented on this; saying that technology gets cheaper and early adopters are often helping pave the road for the future.

Whether Tesla releases a $99/month or $199/month FSD subscription completely depends on how many buyers are buying the FSD package today. I have a feeling it’s rather low or Tesla wouldn’t be considering a monthly subscription in the first place.

As a reader has pointed out, it's possible that Tesla may require a minimum commitment in order to subscribe to FSD at $99/month. This could be used to prevent owners from only subscribing during roadtrips. It could also help offset the costs of any hardware needed to allow FSD, such as upgrading the car's Autopilot hardware from 2.5 to 3.0. Elon Musk has already said that the FSD subscription would cover any hardware needed. A minimum commitment could be one or two-years.

A FSD subscription has the advantage that it is not tied to a particular vehicle, you could subscribe to it in one vehicle, then switch it to another a year or two later. That may be the biggest issue early adopters will have who paid full price for FSD at $7,000 or $10,000. Tesla may allow a one-time transfer of the FSD license for these owners as this has become a popular topic that has yet to be addressed by Elon. It's also possible that Tesla may limit FSD subscriptions to personal use and they would not be able to be used for robotaxis in the future.

We expect Tesla to announce a FSD subscription as low as $99, or as high as $149, in the US very soon.

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Tesla Update 2025.20 Tear Down Reveals Grok Personalities and Icons

@greentheonly on X

While most automakers are adding basic and un-integrated AI assistants to their vehicles, Tesla appears to be working hand-in-hand with xAI to build out an entire cast of characters for in-vehicle Grok. In the latest dive into Tesla’s firmware, Tesla hacker @greentheonly uncovered a few new details about the upcoming Grok feature.

This discovery, part of a larger batch of changes found in Tesla update 2025.20, also offers a hint at the hardware required for the Grok.

A Dozen Groks

While we knew from previous firmware teardowns that Tesla was adding various Grok personalities to the vehicle UI, this update introduces a new one called Language Tutor, which may allow users to learn and practice a new language. 

These are the different personas that will be included in Grok:

• Argumentative

• Assistant

• Conspiracy

• Doctor

• Kids’ Stories

• Kids’ Trivia Games

• Meditation

• Motivation

• Romantic

• Sexy

• Storyteller

• Therapist

• Language Tutor

• and the Grok Classic - Unhinged Mode

Release Date

Icons for these personalities have been added to the firmware for the first time, leading us to think Tesla is getting close to releasing the feature. However, even after the feature is developed and included in vehicle software, Tesla may only enable it selectively — such as for select employees for testing.

Grok is expected to be one of the largest vehicle features added via a software update, so it’ll be a big deal when it’s finally released. While we know more or less what to expect from Grok, what we don’t know is about vehicle requirements or whether it’ll require a subscription beyond Premium Connectivity.

Grok Requirements

While subscriptions required are anyone’s guess, vehicle requirements may be a little clearer now, thanks to Green’s discovery that Grok is only being added to AMD-based vehicle software builds.

Unfortunately, this likely means that older, Intel-based vehicles will not receive Grok support, at least for the time being. When Tesla introduced a voice assistant in China, they also started off with AMD-only support but later added Intel support, so it’s possible that the same could happen with Grok.

Energy Saving

Green also found a new undocumented navigation feature in 2025.20.3. This one focuses on leveraging Tesla’s vast amounts of data in an interesting way and offers drivers proactive advice to save energy on a well-traveled route. 

In the Energy App, your vehicle will display, “This route is typically driven at X mph. Slow down by Y mph to save Z% for the rest of this trip.’ 

As you can see in the photo below, Tesla recognizes that vehicles typically drive at 66 mph on the route being driven and offers the driver the option to go five mph slower to save 1% of range. While this example doesn’t provide much incentive to slow down, it could be useful for someone with a low state of charge or if the savings are more significant.

The new line in the Energy App

Not a Tesla App

In the future, Tesla could even use this, alongside the road surface data they’re gathering, to help plan routes for Robotaxi and Unsupervised FSD.

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NHTSA to Streamline Approvals for Control-Free Vehicles Like Tesla’s Cybercab

Not a Tesla App

In a letter to industry, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has announced that it is overhauling its approvals process for vehicles designed without human controls.

The change addresses a regulatory bottleneck that has slowed down American companies like Tesla from deploying purpose-built Robotaxis, rather than relying on using traditional vehicles with steering wheels and pedals. The policy shift is outlined in a letter posted to the NHTSA’s website, which you can find here.

Reducing Approvals From Years to Months

Under the existing rules today, any vehicle that is built without a steering wheel or brake pedals must receive a special exemption from federal safety standards.

Obtaining exemptions for a particular vehicle was a time-consuming process for both the companies requesting exemptions and the NHTSA. The process was often a black box—nobody knew when an exemption might be granted, and approvals could take years.

The NHTSA, under the new administration’s guidelines for autonomous vehicle development, is now committed to streamlining this process. The agency will be implementing a new, faster approach immediately for receiving exemptions for autonomous vehicles without standard controls. The NHTSA expects decisions on exemption requests to be determined within months rather than years. 

Accelerating the Cybercab

This change has massive implications for Tesla, which is banking on the production of the simplified and easy-to-maintain purpose-built Cybercab. The Cybercab is developed from the ground up as an autonomous Robotaxi and will be one of the key beneficiaries of this move by the NHTSA.

Knowing that a final design won't be caught in a multi-year regulatory limbo provides a level of certainty that has been missing. It allows Tesla to confidently plan the manufacturing, development, and deployment processes without worrying whether the project will get stuck in regulatory approvals.

According to the letter, the agency will publish its improved instructions for the streamlined process "shortly." With Tesla already having begun Cybercab pre-production and the goals for its deployment as soon as late 2026, there’s still a lot to be done to make autonomy a part of Tesla’s new sustainable abundance mission statement.

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