Tesla's Full Self-Driving Is Now 33.3% Cheaper, EAP Owners Who Upgrade Pay Only $2K

Tesla applied another discount to FSD, which was a bit unexpected. The marque made it even cheaper than before. You now have to pay $8,000 instead of $12,000 to get it for the lifetime of the vehicle (or until another transfer is possible), $99 per month to take advantage of the lower upfront cost, or $2,000 if you already paid for the Enhanced Autopilot (EAP) upgrade. The latter was sort of a middle ground between the basic Autopilot found on all Teslas and FSD.

In late August 2022, the company's CEO announced that the ADAS would increase in cost, and the price actually went from $12,000 to $15,000. It was Elon Musk's way of showing everyone that he wasn't exaggerating when he announced that FSD could be worth $100,000 at some point in the future.

Sadly, FSD wasn't the amazing ADAS Tesla's leader wanted it to be. It still made many mistakes, and nobody could trust it completely. Not even Elon Musk was able to have a completely successful journey with the redefined FSD V12. The end-to-end AI implementation may be promising, but it is nowhere near a final release.

Still, some believed him and hopped on the hype train by paying $15,000 for what was and still is an unfinished piece of software. Meanwhile, companies like Waymo were taking people for driverless rides and were showcasing that autonomous driving was possible when you had many more sensors and supervisors.

One year after hiking FSD's price to $15,000, Tesla brought it back to $12,000. Even so, many realized that Tesla was only using them as Beta testers and wasn't actually delivering a fully working ADAS. The suite remained a SAE Level 2 ADAS, even though the brand moved to a neural network solution. Mercedes-Benz, for example, has an SAE Level 3 ADAS. It still needs many prerequisites to work, but it works. The driver doesn't need to pay attention to the road. In the meantime, FSD "can do the wrong thing at the worst time."



Elon Musk also promised that Tesla owners would be able to call their cars from wherever, and they would come to the owner. He also said that the brand's EVs would be able to drive themselves coast-to-coast by 2018. The CEO doubled down in 2019 and explained how the world would see one million Tesla robotaxis by 2021. It's 2024, and nothing has come to fruition.

Tesla still dreams of licensing FSD to other automakers, and it could happen. Rivian, for example, could become a customer because Driver+ isn't getting rave reviews from owners. However, even Rivian doesn't believe in the camera-only approach, which is Tesla Vision. The R2 launch confirmed Rivian's path forward in this regard. It's still a stretch to think that another car brand will pay to use FSD (Supervised) or another future version of it. I would sooner see Waymo licensing its driverless suite than Tesla.

Finally, I believe this isn't an attempt to increase liquidity. Tesla isn't in a position where it needs cash fast. All this is likely happening because video-based learning requires more training data to accelerate FSD Supervised's development.

Once the world's most valuable car maker figures out that it's close to Waymo levels of autonomous driving, it could make a much more refined version of FSD pricier. We could see the SAE Level 2 ADAS grow into a Level 3 suite and continuously evolve based on user-submitted recordings of their driving. But until then, it is my honest take that nobody should be paying $8,000 to become testers of a still unfinished product, especially since the license is attached to the EV and not the driver's profile.