Shock of shocks – another promised Tesla offering is suddenly more expensive now, and previous owners get even less.
Handily coinciding with the wide release of the 10.69.2 Beta update, Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” software has now had a price jump from $12K to $15K. Really.
The new update started rolling out to testers in mid-August, and the patch notes show that Tesla had made “improvements” to basic stuff like left turns as well as upgrading the FSD’s known “creeping” and its animal and pedestrian detection.
But because it’s totes so much better now, you guys, Tesla has decided this is a great reason to jack up the price. This new cost will go into effect Sept. 5, though the previous price will be honored for orders made before Sept. 5, even if they’re delivered after that date. Also, another fun tidbit of information is that this will only be applied to North American customers – other regions will also keep the old price, since they tend to get Autopilot updates later than North American buyers do.
We don’t know yet if this price increase will also impact the FSD subscription service. Right now, that costs $199 per month, and that cost didn’t go up the last time Tesla increased the FSD prices. But, hey– Tesla will still find ways to dig deeper into the wallets of the Faithful™ somehow, like charging them $1,000 to be able to access the FSD hardware they’d already paid for. Progress!
Elon Musk’s most loyal devotees will probably fall for this latest ploy to purchase the software now to “lock in” this price before it goes through more “improvements” and gets even more expensive or because they don’t want to get left out of eventual upgrades … like this latest software “upgrade” that shuts off the radar technology that was sold to customers as “advanced” and “cutting-edge” when it was introduced in the Model 3 back in 2018? To put that in perspective, how would you feel if you’d bought a car with air conditioning four years ago and the manufacturer decided it would better for you if couldn’t use it anymore– then shut it off?
Here’s Tesla’s own promotion of the radar system, from the (old) Model 3 page. Take a look for yourself, then let us know what you think of Musk’s latest move in the comments.
Tesla Model 3 Radar (2018)
