In a nutshell: Tesla will stop allowing customers to purchase its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software as a one-off payment starting next month. Instead, the autonomous driving assistance feature will only be available in its current $99 per month subscription model.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced the change in an X post yesterday. The world's richest person never gave a reason for moving to subscription-only.
The one-off price of FSD has changed a lot over the years. It started at $5,000 in 2019 before increasing to its record high of $15,000 in 2022. This was cut to $12,000 a year later, before Tesla reduced it to the current $8,000 in 2024. The company also reduced the subscription price from its original $199 to $99 in 2024.
In November, Musk admitted that no other automaker wants to license Tesla's FSD technology. He also bemoaned the low adoption rate during Tesla's third-quarter earnings call. Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said in October that only 12% of the company's current fleet subscribes to the software.
The change is likely driven by a condition of Musk's $1 trillion pay package, approved by Tesla's board last year, that requires reaching 10 million active FSD subscriptions. Making the feature subscription-only is obviously going to help reach that milestone.
Tesla will stop selling FSD after Feb 14.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 14, 2026
FSD will only be available as a monthly subscription thereafter.
Tesla's FSD/Autopilot and related systems have been subject to several NHTSA investigations. In 2024, a report from the NHTSA linked Tesla's Autopilot systems to nearly 1,000 crashes from the last few years, over two dozen of them fatal. The agency launched a new investigation into FSD in October covering about 2.88 million vehicles equipped with the technology. By December 2025, the NHTSA had identified at least 80 instances of alleged FSD violations.
Tesla's official materials consistently emphasize that FSD is a supervised assistance system, not full autonomy, and that the driver must remain engaged. The company's official position is that the human driver retains ultimate responsibility – to stay attentive, keep hands on the wheel, be ready to intervene, control speed, and not treat the system as "self-driving," despite the system's name.
According to Slingshot Strategies' Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report for August, which surveyed more than 8,000 Americans, only 14% of consumers said FSD makes them more likely to buy a Tesla vehicle. About a third of participants (35%) said it makes them less likely to do so, while 51% said it makes no difference.