Tesla is once again raising the price of its Full Self-Driving feature

UPDATE 1/19/2022 3:34 ET: Tesla Full Self-Driving now costs $12,000 – unless you pay monthly

Hey Tesla fans, here’s some bad news for your wallets. CEO Elon Musk tweeted out the other day that Full Self-Driving (FSD) will raise in price to a $12,000 option at the time of ordering your new car. This new increase goes into effect for customers in the US on January 17.

This is the latest time that Tesla has raised the price on its Full Self-Driving driver’s aid, which is still around Level 2 on the autonomous driving scale. Way back in 2019, Musk said that the price tag will “increase substantially over time,” from the $6,000 price it was at during that time frame.

The price for FSD had already gone up by $1,000 before that tweet went out, with an increase in May of that year. At the end of 2020, FSD got yet another price increase, from $8,000 to its current $10,000 cost.

Who knows what the eventual price of FSD will be? Musk thinks it will have a $100,000 ‘value’ once it gets to the full-autonomous stage with legislation allowing its operation, but the value of a thing is often disconnected from its price.

FSD started being road-tested in beta back in October of 2020, with a small number of the Tesla owners that had already paid anywhere between $5,000 and $8,000 for the feature.

A wider roll-out is in progress right now, for drivers that meet Tesla’s safety score requirements.

Maybe it’s a good thing that the price tag on FSD is increasing. The National Transportation Safety Board hopes that Tesla will put more emphasis on fixing “basic safety issues” before letting more drivers use the system.

Tesla is also under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, for the number of times a Tesla has crashed into a parked emergency vehicle. Tesla could use that price raise to fix bugs or even hire more in-house test drivers.

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Joe Rice-Jones

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