Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Back when Autopilot launched, in consumer cars, it was pretty unique. But the market has moved on significantly, and basic Steering Assist/Full-Speed-Range Automatic Cruise Control, are pretty universal features today.
My only complaint is that there's an over-eager PID loop with lane keeping. If I want to pass a transport truck and want to kind of edge to the left of my lane when doing so, it will keep trying to compensate, which I can feel in the wheel, so I compensate for as well. And if I let go of the wheel and let it win, it suddenly flings me towards the right side of the lane.
I suspect this is because it isn't programmed to think that I'm making adjustments, it probably just thinks there's some weirdness in the vehicle dynamics/road characteristics that requires extra compensation.
But there was one thing that was quite bad, similar to yours. While passing a semi I pulled it to the left side and it actually yanked us right so hard and then over-corrected once again. Super scary moment, the only issue of the whole trip, but basically never passed with it on again.
Should also be noted that i never take my hands of the wheel. And the volvo is quite fast at beeping at me if it detects that i dont hang onto the wheel.
It's essentially that Subaru's lane system actually has two levels: it has lane keeping where it's just trying to keep you inside the lines, and then on top of that it also has lane centering which is pretty much what it says.
Just a note for you or anyone reading who has a recent Subaru and doesn't know already: if you find the centering really bothersome, you should be able to be able to go into the settings on the instrument cluster display (up/down arrows at the lower left behind the wheel, toggle it until you get to the "hold for settings" option), find the Eyesight settings, and turn off lane centering. It will still try to keep you inside the lane markers but won't try to park you right in the center of the lane. In that mode, it's more like the Honda Sensing system I had on my 2016 Civic.
I go back and forth a bit on it but mostly keep it in lane centering mode now - I've gotten used to how it positions the car in the lane, and it lets me focus more on what's going on around me than micromanaging lane position and such.
Same with Hyundai except they call them "Lane Keeping Assist" (LKA) and "Lane Following Assist" (LFA) and I have trouble remembering which one centers you and which one just keeps you from leaving the lane.
To me just based on the names I'd have expected keeping to be the one that actively positions you (it keeps you centered) and following to the one that just reacts when you are going to depart the lane (it keeps you following the lane).
Mostly now I just remember that the one that comes on automatically any time I'm going 40+ mph is the reactive one, and the one that I have to explicitly turn on is the centering one (although both come on automatically on certain highways based on data from the navigation system).
lane centering is a bit too annoying for me, i need to keep my hands on the wheels anyway.
Alignments off. Not as bad as it used to be to get it done.
I drive an old beater from 2001, but... I really don't think I understand why people want these in-between not-quite-autopilot features? To me it's like, it would be one thing if you could completely turn your brain off, or look at your phone, or rest. But since you can't, it seems like this stuff makes it more difficult to pay the appropriate amount of attention? For me, if I'm already driving somewhere, and have to pay enough attention to know if an emergency is about to happen, I might as well just do the driving.
Cruise control with minimum distance helps me keep a sound distance even as other cars keep packing up and reducing distances on a busy highway. My previous car (Mercedes) was great at detecting if a new car coming in front of me was accelerating, if so it didn't adjust the distance as aggressively. Much better behavior than my current Kia.
Auto-break features are sweet as they react really fast. If that can avoid deploying an airbag in my face, I'm all for it.
I agree it's a lot like managing, with six buttons just to do the above, but from a bottom-up approach, each feature has value in its own right.
> For me, if I'm already driving somewhere, and have to pay enough attention to know if an emergency is about to happen, I might as well just do the driving.
Where do you draw the line? Would you prefer not having a steering and brake servo? Would you prefer sticking out your arms instead of having flashing lights? Would you prefer feeling every bump in the road to having suspension?
To me these systems just feel like natural evolution of the car concept, something that's been going on for 120 years. What Tesla failed at was putting their heads in the clouds and hoping something awesome would eventually pop out the other end. While the established car makers did incremental improvements.
A car shouldn't "keep the turn radius", they normally drive straight by default. The forces acting on the wheels do that automatically.
It doesn't seem like a wrong thing, to me.
> Where do you draw the line?
I think the line is quite obvious between the physical comfort features and the mentally disengaging features.
Based on what you're saying, it seems the divide arises from some drivers classifying these features as physical comfort, and some as mentally disengaging.
I think something like autopilot could be implemented at the infrastructure level (sensors and emitters along the road), but people wouldn't like that because it would mean being unable to set your speed or overtake. The car exists for "freedom," but it is really an inefficient mode of transportation from both a time-use and energy-use perspective.
What we really need is a mix between rail/train and car/road.
However, something that is extremely annoying in France is that speed limits tend to change very often and abruptly. I just think that trying to solve the problem solely at the car level is always going to have too many limitations...
And before anyone suggests that I start tinkering around with the settings, I have adjusted it and the damned thing just resets itself constantly.
I don't want 'nap in the backseat while it drives me places', I want this. A bit of a personality keeping me on track and tidy. I'll keep my hands on the wheel but yeah, my attention is spared to watch for idiots, and I think that's good.
It's absolutely true that the rest of the industry is rolling out new features. But people are fooling themselves if they genuinely think it's catching up. Tesla is way, way ahead here among consumer auto vendors, and frankly at parity with Waymo in the autonomy space.
They've also made an inexplicably poor pricing decision in this case that is worth talking about. But no, your Subaru isn't a meaningful competitor.
Tesla is a car company. Every car company is a competitor to Tesla.
As a legacy EV manufacturer, Tesla is struggling to compete in the current car market. Tesla's sales have declined for the last two years.
It's why they're having to squeeze fewer customers for more revenue.
It's just a stunt. They took a machete to the feature set to find Just One Thing that would meet the requirements. All it does is use radar to follow another car on a selection of fixed, geofenced limited access highways. It can't handle the leader changing lanes, or going too fast (won't even get to the speed limit). It won't navigate, it won't change lanes. It can't even operate on an open road.
But it's "L3V31 THr333", so otherwise rational nerds get to yell about it on the internet. No one actually shows this thing off in their cars, it's not useful for real driving. FSD drives me around literally every day.
Waymos have been driving around autonomously for years; meanwhile Tesla taxis have a human in the car ready to activate a kill switch at all times. Therefore, your statement is objectively false.
EDIT: Oops, this isn't quite correct anymore — as of two days ago, in a geofenced area of Austin, Tesla has moved the safety person to a follower car: https://xcancel.com/JoeTegtmeyer/status/2014410572226322794#....
FWIW, your logic works better the other way around anyway: if the system didn't work, there would be easily-accessible proof to that effect showing the resulting hilarity as the operator needed to step in. There isn't.
And... of course there isn't. Because FSD is real and works and it drives a ton of us around every day. Is it possible that there are failure modes? Of course. Thus the safety personnel. But the bar of "if they believed it worked" was crossed years ago. Yes, it works. Duh. Go to a dealer and get a test drive if you don't believe people on the internet.
Waymos are autonomous vehicles, Tesla has some vehicles which may operate autonomously in certain circumstances. There's a big difference.
I know it's upsetting to think that someone you hate has a good product, but... they do. Arguing on the internet isn't rolling back the launch.
This has nothing to do with Elon musk. From a purely technical standpoint, no - Tesla DOES NOT have autonomous vehicles to the level of their competitors. It's not a matter of opinion.
Waymo doesn't have one or more operators dedicated to each vehicle for the entire time it is on the road. That is massively different. The latest disengagement data for FSD 14 shows that Tesla is still behind where Waymo was more than a decade ago.
The point is that it now only does that if you subscribe. If I dont want to pay a monthly fee, an economy car now has a better feature set in this area
It's... a car. You already pay a monthly fee. Probably several.
I get the marketing angle here, that this is a bad look and will drive away customers.
I was responding to the attempt upthread (which you just repeated) to conflate it with a technical argument ("better feature set"). The feature set is not worse because it costs money. FSD is in fact market leading.
Eh? Insurance? Registration? Not a fee but ok, ongoing cost. That doesn’t justify more ongoing costs.
> FSD is in fact market leading.
The article and the discussion is about autopilot, not FSD.
It makes the idea of a putative consumer who refuses to pay ongoing costs for their car a little silly though. Argue about whether the product value is worth the cost, not from a position of "people won't pay any more for their already extremely expensive vehicles".
> The article and the discussion is about autopilot, not FSD.
The fee under discussion is literally the cost of purchasing an FSD subscription.
Funny, I totally read this intro the opposite way of what you went on to argue.
Yep. My workaround is basically hanging back or just being prepared to gas it a bit so it doesn't freak out.
Maybe I just need more time with it but, my toyota had adaptive cruise and slammed on the brakes one time and I did not like it. On a one lane highway the car a decent ways in front of me slowed down and started moving into the shoulder to take a right turn into a driveway. As i came up on him he was almost all the way over, just his driver side wheels on the line. I moved to the far side of the lane with plenty of room to clear without slowing down and my toyota slammed on the brakes going from 65 to like 40 and it scared the shit out of me. It was a greater level of surprise and fear than I’d experienced in probably the last 20k miles of driving and was completely avoidable had I been using dumb cruise control.
Driving my mom’s Honda insight with lane assist also made me nervous when I would be near the edge of a lane on purpose and it would move the wheel on its own.
I’m not opposed to fully automated driving, but what I don’t want is to be in a situation where I need to remain alert and responsible for managing a system that does the driving. I’d rather just do the driving myself. I’ve driven for almost 20 years now, some of that professionally, and it’s second nature at this point and doesn’t require active thought outside navigating new routes and finding parking. Managing the system requires more effort for me.
I now drive a standard 33 year old truck and it’s bliss. No software updates, no bs, just a machine that takes my inputs and gets me from A to B. That said, without airbags, crumple zones and abs I’d have to get something more modern if there were children in the picture.
I have a '22 Outback. My Dad has a Tesla of similar vintage. I have to pay about as much attention for FSD as I do with the Subaru, the difference being the Subaru is more predictable.
Can't wait for Waymo to start chopping into the top end of the market.
That’s lane keep/lane assist; not lane centering. It’s supposed to bounce between the edges of the lane. (I guess, not supposed to, but that’s what it does as opposed to actually tracking some position in the lane).
The auto industry as a whole did a massive disservice not clearly differentiating “lane keep”/“lane assist” v/s “lane centering”. They are hugely different and trying to use lane keep to stay centered is really dangerous.
Same model car with different trim levels/packages would have lane keep or lane centering making it really confusing to consumers what they had and what safe usage would be.
This is a pretty boneheaded business decision on Tesla's part. But their technology remains clearly superior.
People had a feature for free, now they don’t, because Tesla wants money.
“But it’s better…” only if you pay. If you don’t, still gone.
What else matters?
I see nothing wrong with them offering a cheap(er) FSD option. I object to them removing existing features to force adoption.
No features are being removed from existing cars. The policy is about what they sell on new ones.
By the way, FSD ("full self-driving") is just as inaccurately named as Autopilot. I don't know why Tesla can't call their technology, like, CyberDrive or something else that isn't glaringly inaccurate.
It’s not close to FSD, Tesla wouldn’t call FSD as Auto pilot because auto pilots un the aircraft industry are pretty dumb (the first autopilot was literally a rope tied to the aircraft control stick). FSD used to be the expensive paid add on feature while autopilot was a more reasonably priced upgrade.
Previously you got the Corolla feature set included with your vehicle purchase, Enhanced Autopilot for a fee which was a step above that, and then FSD subscription which was a step-up again.
Now Tesla has downgraded the base experience to include no Steering Assist at all, and no longer offers Enhanced Autopilot. So you get two choices: No Steering Assist or FSD.
Let's not slaughter the language for the sake of a few letters.
2. Elon's Trillion Dollar Payout is tied to a certain number of FSD Subscriptions.
3. Some consumers were sold that they would get hardware upgrades for FSD. I'm pretty sure Tesla would like to minimize that, and I expect incentives for those people to purchase new vehicle without FSD.
4. Subscriptions drive our economy, I don't know the details but it seems like every company wants subscriptions over one time purchases.
I honestly don't think they want a lot of people with lifetime FSD, it's disappearing without a lot of news.
Every person I know wants a subscription, too. Who wouldn’t want a nest egg throwing off passive income?
Anything you can do to operationalize cash flows is a huge boon to continuity of business operations
I don't argue that they're great from a predatory business perspective. The consistency you state comes on the back of negative value for customers though. Particularly now that everything is a subscription. People are worn TF out by keeping track of the people hoovering their money away.
You mean consumer? I genuinely cannot understand why anyone would buy a car or a bed or a fridge that requires a subscription. That's beyond me.
I do understand why companies want to screw consumers, obviously.
There's a huge car finance market where people do exactly that. How much they pay a finance company monthly vs. how much they pay the manufacturer monthly makes little difference to them. It's all about the monthly fee and what they get in return for it.
If I'm buying something that has recurring costs to deliver services, I feel better if I'm covering those costs, so I'm buying something with a sustainable business model.
Subscription service for heated seats - outrageous.
Subscription service for premium, ad-free mapping - reasonable.
In theory, subscriptions are cheaper for users as well when done right and it works better with how people are compensated. But as usual, greed consumes all and if everything is a bill, that's more ways to eat at your long term wealth.
In other words: you will own nothing and like it.
That explains things.
That wording is misleading because so far as I can tell, that payout is in tranches, and the FSD subscriptions milestone is only tied to one of the tranches. Therefore it's not as if 1 trillion dollars is riding on whether he gets enough FSD subscriptions, only 1/12th of that.
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0...
There's a whole app called rocket money to fight back against the subscription model by helping you find and cancel subs. I've never used it and don't plan to but it would be cool if it helped push back against the modern shift towards subscription-everything.
Although if we're talking about software or anything else that could easily be one-time/up-front or ongoing, then I guess there's a case to be made that monthly subscriptions let you try before you buy, like rental skis. In that sense they are user friendly.
Genuine question because as mentioned I don't use the product (nor do I care enough to rabbit hole).
And like you said other targets are quite something as well
The price is high, but it's not unique to Tesla. Ford has Blue Cruise, which is about $500/year.
People can, however, opt for openpilot/comma (https://comma.ai/openpilot), which random Youtubers tested and say it's about as good as Tesla's FSD, but has a simple one time fee of $1K But whether you want to trust open source is up to you.
I also have a Lexus ES 2025, I bought the Comma for it and it works better than Tesla’s AutoPilot (the thing they’re taking away new new Teslas). AutoPilot isn’t great to begin with, I kinda always hated it. But I do like cars that can drive themselves when I have long road trips and wanna be able to look at work. Comma makes that completely doable on the Lexus.
So you don't get even that in a Tesla without (now) ponying up $$? Something that's a standard feature in my non cloud connected (or connectable!) "so last century" fossil fuel vehicle?
Heck, a cheap base model Maza 3 I rented had lane keep assist.
Tesla only stands to lose by gatekeeping what's now a basic feature behind a paywall.
I miss having a dumb cruise control.
I have a 2014 car that's connectable but no driver assistance; I had a 2017 (delivered mid 2016) with lane keeping and emergency braking which seemed pretty new and exciting, and it's connectable, all I would need to do is pay a big annual fee and also setup a 3g CDMA network. Couldn't do much with either if it's connected; I pulled the 3g modem from the 2014 when it was convenient cause I was worried it was using power while off.
Not that lane keeping needs a connection, just that I'm surprised they put it on a car without a modem.
I’ve been paying the monthly for a while. Very worth it to me.
IMO adaptive crude control that works down to 0MPH is still the sweet spot.
But for driving in slow traffic with no passing lane for the next half hour (Highway 7 between Perth and Marmora, for Ontarians) it's a godsend. Just let it handle it and chill.
- Is it unsupervised?
- Has legal liability shifted as a result of the system being the driver?
Because I feel like the answer needs to be "yes" for this claim to be accurate. If the answer isn't "yes," then you're still meant to be fully engaged with driving and are liable for any accidents that occur.
Second, I have a 2025 Model 3, and even with the latest v14.2.2 FSD I had an intervention rate of roughly every ten miles in Washington DC/VA suburbs. I shudder to think what it would do if I didn't pay attention, so I don't think it's an improvement over me driving myself.
I believe you, but occasionally it will try to kill you.
This last week they had a guy who had completely passed out in his car and was fast asleep at the wheel. A state trooper pulled up alongside it and could see the guy slumped over his wheel. Apparently the car was essentially weaving back and forth between the lane lines because the car had LKAS enabled, effectively keeping the car from driving off the road.
The state trooper followed the car for several miles trying to decide what he should do. He tried several times by running his lights and sirens, honking, etc to no avail. He finally found a safe spot and successfully pitted the car to a stop. During the pit, the man suddenly woke up - for obvious reasons.
They later found out he had been working 22 hours straight and then was driving to his GF's house several hours away for the weekend and was just exhausted and fell asleep at the wheel.
As for the safety feature. I inherited (literally) a second car that's 10 years older than the primary one. You get used to LKAS. I was driving a long distance in the older one while somewhat overtired and had several rumble strip excursions that would not have happened in the LKAS-equipped car. And for the asleep guy in the parent post, it may have made the difference between still being alive and dead in head-on collision or rollover.
If the weight of your foot was somehow enough to push the pedal though, you could certainly keep going.
With a car on lane keeping / cruise control you could slow down in front of it all the way to a stop and it will gladly stop behind you.
> What a total idiot in the police car.
It's important to make sure we have all the context before making a judgement like this. My rule of thumb is that if I think something is obviously stupid, I'm probably missing something.
Blue Cruise, and I assume Tesla's FSD as well, will simply change the lane and go around you.
If the guy had a simple LKAS and adaptive cruise control on, then yes, you're right.
If it’s a simple enough system maybe it would just keep going the same speed no matter what until it hit you.
No such thing as a safe spot to PIT someone, ever, let alone while they're asleep at the wheel. This is a great example of why people hate all cops, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would get in front of the car and gradually slow to a stop.
I am thrown by the question of "What else should have been done" though, after grandparent made an explicit recommendation
If you’re using it the way you’re supposed to and giving real steering input then it helps you stay within the lines. So it’s less effort for you and it helps mitigate large wind gusts and such.
But basically lane keeping is absolutely not meant to steer for you.
Maybe the average cop has better driving skills than I'm giving them credit for, but...I doubt it...
A certain segment of the public, plus cops themselves (having significant overlap with that segment), love it though, because they enjoy seeing non-compliance met with life-endangering levels of force and can't understand why any of us wouldn't enjoy it unless we want more crime or something.
So a bunch of suspects who weren't, car chase aside, any imminent danger to anyone, and their possibly-unwilling passengers, end up dead or life-alteringly injured... and so do plenty of people who had nothing to do with any of it. Often over what was originally just e.g. property crime.
Causing the speeding car to go out of control is also not a great thing for public safety, and does kill and cripple people who are in no way involved in these chases. We have jurisdictions with no-chase rules and it doesn’t seem to cause some hypothesized explosion in crime. It is in-fact ok to not do them, as satisfying as they might feel.
You can imagine some kind of built in remote kill switch, but I can't see that being advocated here.
Fortunately in USA we have many state jurisdictions to choose from so we can each live under the sort of laws that suit us best!
The factual outcomes almost don't matter; what matters is perception among the masses. For example, if people largely believe that shoplifting is not prosecuted in a city, and they see shoplifting occur, it is extremely depressing, even if they see the person arrested. It's demoralizing. It also probably leads to more attempts at shoplifting overall. I use this example because it's common enough in a few cities.
High speed chases are rare, so it's not as immediately obvious. But if people see on the news two stories, "man kills woman, cops are there, he flees in car, high speed chase, crashes into innocent bystander killing self and them" versus "man kills woman, cops are there, he flees in car, police arent allowed to chase him so he is currently at large, but they are trying to track him by other means", the latter is far more demoralizing, makes one lose faith in society and the rule of law, makes one less proud of their culture, etc etc. This is a serious effect over time.
At some level, society needs to believe that bad behaviors are punished and that good guys are trying their best to stop bad guys. This is very important to a functioning society. When people stop believing that, culture declines rapidly. Even if the utilitarian outcome is slightly better when not stopping bad guys sometimes (e.g. not prosecuting the previous president even if you could), it's usually not worth the resultant demoralization.
(And of course it's not a strict either/or as well: you can have a rules of engagement for such things. e.g. in the UK the police are not blanket banned from pursuing a fleeing vehicle, but they need to have had appropriate training and do so only in particular circumstances)
I used it a couple of times, but then I stopped; for me, as a driver/passenger, it has very little value. Yes, maybe I can lower my attention from 100% to 95%, but it does not make much difference: I need to keep my hands on the wheel, it disengages at random (for me) times.
True autopilot is very different.
Every young adult I know uses a subscription for everything I used to buy. Even though they own the device on which they consume it.
Spotify for cd's, Netflix-Disney-Amazon for vhs and dvd's, Udemy-Masterclass for books.
Equivalently, a Spotify premium subscription in 2000 would be a little under $7.
I guarantee that if you asked young adults in 2000 if they would be interested in a subscription that lets them listen to nearly everything available on CD, at any time, as often as they wished, for $7/month they would have been ecstatic.
Same for DVDs, which were typically in the $20-25 range for new releases in 2000. They would not have been quite as happy as they would have been with Spotify because of the way video is split among several streaming services, but it would still be seen as a tremendous improvement.
It's a silly example, but you can think of it as buying a house and the ceiling lights requiring a subscription to turn on.
As an aside, I wonder how long this can keep up before it begins affecting laws around theft and property damage if the person operating, storing, insuring, and maintaining the physical objects don't contractually own them. Is Mercedes a victim if the LKAS camera gets damaged or stolen, rather than you?
Are you sure they bought the ML Models?
The Hardware is inside because it's required for the emergency lane keeping, but I wouldn't be surprised if the OEMs would have a deal with the supplier where they are paid more if this feature gets enabled
Screw the subscriptions. I don't care how much the shareholders want them.
Agreed. The investor requirements of any company mean nothing to me as the consumer.
This is an example of what I am talking about.
I too thought it would be nice on long drives, but really it hasn't made that much difference. Like everyone I speed on the freeway, but not as much as everyone else, so it rarely has to actually adapt. :-)
The place I've found it makes a huge difference is stop and go or near stop and go traffic. You can't set it to a speed below 20 mph, but if the car it is following goes below that it keeps working all the way down to 0 mph. (You don't have to be going 20 mph to set it. You can set it if you are going above something like 3 or 4 mph, or if you are stopped and there is a stopped car ahead of and it thinks you are on a street. It just sets the speed to 20 mph when you set it under those circumstances).
If the car ahead starts moving again within a few seconds it will automatically follow. If longer it will beep once when the car ahead starts moving and show a message about the lead car leaving. Tapping the accelerator or flicking the cruise control speed adjust switch on the steering wheel will resume following.
Not all adaptive cruise control systems work all the way down to 0 mph. Some cut off well above that. Some only work down to 0 mph on higher trims.
Making sure I get one that does is now on my "must have" requirements for any future car.
The only point of cruise control is to take your foot off the peddle and to zone out and stop paying attention to how fast you're going. This is already Not Great to have in cars, but adding the same to the steering wheel, making drivers feel emboldened to look away, is probably a big part of the reason so many cars on the road today seem like they're being driven by deranged psychopaths; the drivers are actually tuned out doing other shit!
Although even if the devices stop getting updates, that makes them on par with most built in car software and lane assist stuff which never gets updated in the car's life anyway.
That was my original main complaint with Tesla and why I distrusted them so much before Elon publicly lost the plot.
Even with Autopilot it was clear to me they were far more willing to force the risks of their systems on all other drivers on the road then the legacy auto makers who were much more cautious about testing things extremely thoroughly first. All those early videos of people climbing in the backs of their cars while they were driving down the highway? To me that was proof they couldn’t be trusted with public safety.
The specs are pretty good but then you don’t really own it, you get limitations on what you can use it for, you get rent seeking and walled gardens everywhere. Even if you’re paying you get ads and get tracked. Updates make products worse more often than not.
What are you excited about? AI slop?
A little credit please?! I don't use AI anything. I code my stuff the old fashioned way with nested if/else statements that make you cry trying to follow along. And damn the coworker that interrupts your debugging asking if you got their email or not.
I daily a 30 year old car. There exists a sweet spot of reliability, safety, and comfort (probably the early-mid 2000s) that in theory, you should never have to buy a vehicle outside of, newer or older. There will always be clean old cars in good shape you can buy, you don't need a new vehicle.
Unless you can't buy gasoline anymore. But that's still quite a long ways away imo.
I haven't been keeping up with the progress in this space. Last I heard, Benz introduced some sort of self driving feature AND accepted full liability for it (whereas Tesla does not). How does Benz's self driving compare to Teslas?
I was honestly stunned by how far the tech has come. It basically drove us door to door without a single intervention.
https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/12/mercedes-pauses-level-3...
I drove Mercedes and BMW L3 offering. Both had a really restricted ODD (Operational Design Domain) for it to be of much use outside high traffic situations on an Autobahn. It was restricted to good weather and speeds of around 60km/h. Basic all conditions under which their set of sensors and CPUs would work optimally.
But that was 2021 technology. L4 level of autonomy will be in the market during the next 4/5 years, no doubt. And that will be a game changer for anyone driving any significant amount of time. Sleeping, reading, watching a movie or just working on the laptop will be possible. And the manufacturer will take full responsibility of the driving while the functions are active.
'In a post on X.com, Musk said Tesla "started Tesla Robotaxi drives in Austin with no safety monitor in the car. Congrats to the Tesla AI team!"'
He really did mean "in the car". The safety supervisor is still there, just in another car [1], so it's not technically a lie, silly us!
[1]: https://xcancel.com/JoeTegtmeyer/status/2014410572226322794#....
Waymo on the other hand, I trust it with my life on a weekly basis and have never had cause for concern (fingers crossed I didn't just jinx it).
> "Full Self-Driving" costs $8,000. BYD includes its version for free on a $9,300 car.
These are unrelated things. Tesla's comparative offering (at the time this article was written) was also included for free.
No wonder they need to hide behind a tariff wall.
I am saying that the article is comparing two features that are different and alluding to them being the same to confuse the non-informed reader.
I have no idea what a "tariff wall" is, but I don't believe Tesla or BYD pay a tariff in my country.
We don't use FSD, we don't use Autopilot either.
But I'll be goddamed if he tries to take away something I paid for.
The article doesn’t explain what happens to simple lane leeping. Surely it should be free like in any other car (like my Volvo).
New Teslas will now only have "Traffic Aware Cruise Control" as standard without lane assist, i.e. keeps pace with traffic and can stop/start, but user still has to provide steering input.
It’s like an upside down freemium model - try out our basic self driving product, which is (now) the worst in the market, so you’ll convert to the premium FSD offering.
Under the new 2026 pricing structure, Autosteer has been removed. *New vehicles will now only ship with Traffic-Aware Cruise Control*. Buyers who want the vehicle to steer itself on highways must now pay for the software that was once standard.
https://electrek.co/2026/01/23/tesla-cuts-standard-autopilot...
Tesla cannot take anything away that was on the Monroney sticker. This includes AP.
While unfortunate for consumers, it cleans up the offerings. For four years, I didn't buy FSD because Autopilot was good enough to cover highway driving and I couldn't justify $99/month for the "last mile". If you strip out Autopilot and given the latest FSD, I would 100% buy the FSD subscription.
Removing the lifetime purchase option also simplified my mental model. Before, I was always stressed that if I bought a few months, loved FSD, and then bought the lifetime, I would have "wasted" those few months. Plus, every month I owned the car yet didn't buy lifetime FSD made it worth "less" to me: I'd eventually sell the car, so I'd missed out on those few months of usage.
I do wish Tesla offered a price lock: so long as you maintain your FSD subscription, your price is guaranteed for 5 years. Otherwise, it does feel scary: I spend 50k on a car for its FSD and over time, they jack the price to $200 or $500/month. Also, if they jack up FSD prices and then lower base car prices, your Tesla's value decreases effectively, which feels even worse.
I can't shake the feeling of trusting an already complex machine to yet another layer of complexity through software.
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The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.
— Scotty, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
Also, this move is beyond stupid IMO. Autopilot is Tesla's ONLY moat now that their Supercharger network is open to everyone. Gating that behind a $99/mo sub is guaranteed to make buyers shop elsewhere, especially now that the EV tax credit is no longer and the OEMs (and our O&G friendly admin) are rallying around EREVs.
Pressing the brake pedal and maintaining a stationary position is billed at a rate of $0.003 per second of immobility.
Energy dissipation during the braking event costs an additional $0.00001 per Joule of heat generated.
It doesn't contain maps or context of the roads, it is just Auto-Steer + Lane-Change + Full-Range Cruise Control under one brand-umbrella. Mostly useful on the Motorways/Freeways, and commonly found in competitor's vehicles.
Of course, I don't trust it as much as I trust Waymo's system, and I'm very careful when using it in rain or fog...
Anecdotes like yours are often from the point of view of someone in California - sunny, clear weather most of the year. In monsoon rain, fog, snow, or unusual markings on the road, all these systems break down.
Well then, this isn't the car for you. For many other people the safety features are important. I wouldn't mind if every car had a camera that made sure the driver was paying attention and didn't fall asleep.
What you're describing sounds like the former system, while the latter one is what should be compared to Tesla's "autopilot" or "FSD" or whatever the fuck. It works very well on both my cars and is a game changer for longer drives.
I consider good implementations of this and adaptive cruise to be basic equipment now, and asking $99/month for them is absolutely wild, especially since what you're getting isn't the "full self driving" we were promised. You still have to be fully engaged with what the car is doing and ready to take over in a fraction of a second.
The article doesn't mention it but other articles say that their version of adaptive cruise control (Traffic Aware Cruise Control or TACC) that was part of Autopilot is becoming a standard feature.
Seems like Subaru lane assist is considerably better than when it first came out in 2013 or so. I was able to experience it back then and it could have pinballed, certainly wasn't as steady and capable as it is more than ten years of development later.
Basic stay-in-line and start/stop following in traffic has become pretty standard for almost a decade at this point and paywalling it now would be outrageous. I have a 2017 car that does this.
If you turn on TACC, it will constantly whine that you're hugging the side of 'your lane'. But it's one lane for both directions, you're supposed to hug your side!
In my SAAB I used cruise control anywhere I expected to maintain speed for any amount of time. In the Y I don't bother on this type of road because it bitches at me constantly and sometimes even jerks me to the middle of the lane. That's never happened with oncoming traffic but I'm not risking it.
[1]https://shorturl.at/jSQhP (shortened, Maps links are huge)
There's even Teslas operating as "auto taxis" now in some cities - they drive entirely without anyone even in the driver seat.
How long do people keep their Tesla normally?
Not worth it for anyone doing less than 100 miles/day.
So instead of admitting they were wrong all along and doing what's necessary to catch up (add LiDAR to their sensor stack), they are going to quietly "pivot" Tesla to a "ai and robotics" company, with the monthly fee they'll continue to bilk anyone who is still enthralled enough to believe them on their FSD grift, but they will run the same scam as they did with FSD (Musk will say "humanoid robots for the home in in 3 years", yet we will still be waiting for them to be useful in the year 2035)
Waymo isn't just the Waymo Driver technology and sensor suite. It's charging and cleaning depots. It's product support both for the customer and the vehicle that scales. It's an insane amount of LiDAR acquired 3-D mapping data, plus real time data from Google maps and navigation.
Meanwhile Tesla has replaced some of the drivers sitting in the front seat with chase cars. Just to make the technically correct claim that the cars are no longer supervised by someone in the car.
I think I see it more bluntly. Elon knows exactly what his buisiness model is: hype. It has been wildly successful. The cars are okay, but the hype surrounding them is extremely disproportionate.
The speed is what I like, and the simplicity when I bought it. I hate 10,000 trim options with random prices like BMW and having to argue with a sales guy - just gimme the price!
Progress, for sure.
Waymo expanded highway operations at the end of last year
https://apnews.com/article/waymo-autonomous-driverless-cars-...
The next step will be remote monitors with the ability to drive if needed. That will be identical to Waymo I now.
Then the next step is nobody watching.
Progress is fantastic, it means more choices for consumers, lower prices, better tech.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response#:~:text=In%20f...
> Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.
This site has become ridiculously biased.
Side A: Tesla can grow FSD subscription revenue by making FSD + Autopilot completely based on subscription. Lot more people use Autopilot than FSD. In the happy path such users will pay the subscription and that revenue will increase.
Side B: Autopilot (aka lane keeping) is fast becoming default option across manufacturers. Tesla will take a dip in sales if such 'basic' option is no longer available.
Whether side A > side B is to be seen.
Not paying $99/mo for it.
The issue is not that “FSD” is $99/mo. The issue is that a feature of $22k cars (lane keeping) is behind the $99/mo paywall.
Basically not enough people were buying the subscription for Elon to get his payout. But someone who just wants auto steering isn’t going to decide they’ll pay $99/mo for that. So this is just going to make people who like that feature not buy a new Tesla when the time comes.
I'm not a Tesla fan, I will never own a fully self driving car, but I don't have a problem with a company charging money for features that consumers want. There are about a dozen other car manufacturers in the US alone that can sell self driving cars without a subscription if they want to.
Autopilot is not self-driving, it is lane-centering with traffic aware cruise control. It has not gotten any maintenance or updates in years, as far as we can tell.
Identical functionality is available from many competitors with no subscription. This is a noteworthy decision for Tesla because AP has long been one of their defining features, dropping it is a big step backward just as the market caught up.
Nobody is forced to buy a Tesla, correct, but that isn't a requirement for newsworthiness.