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- Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company’s “full self-driving” subscription should “for sure” launch before July.
- This marks a slight delay. Musk tweeted that Tesla was taking some more time to build out the software.
- FSD is currently available in beta for a one-off $10,000 fee. The subscription price isn’t yet known.
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Elon Musk said Monday that subscriptions for Tesla’s “full self-driving” (FSD) feature should be available in the second quarter of 2021 – a slight delay from his earlier prediction.
In response to a Twitter user who asked when the electric car company’s FSD subscription was launching, Musk replied: “Q2 for sure.”
The price of an FSD subscription isn’t known, but Musk said that “buying FSD will still be a better long-term deal than subscription.”
FSD currently costs a one-off $10,000 and is available in beta form to some drivers. It does not make a Tesla car fully autonomous.
It is an add-on to Tesla’s Autopilot – which can brake, accelerate, and steer automatically – and allows cars to park themselves, change lanes, and identify both stop signs and traffic lights. The company released a beta version to some Tesla owners in October.
The subscription, which allows drivers to pay for Tesla's advanced driver-assistance system in installments rather than the whole package at once, has faced numerous delays.
Musk said in Tesla's third-quarter earnings call in October that the company would release the feature to the public by the end of 2020, per The Verge.
But this got pushed back. Musk tweeted in December that the "full self-driving" package will be rolled out as a subscription in early 2021. Now it looks like it could be postponed until mid-2021, judging by Monday's tweet.
In a separate tweet, Musk said the reason behind the delay of FSD was that Tesla was taking more time to improve AI in the software.