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Tesla Full Self-Driving monthly subscriptions poised for 2021 launch
Tesla is planning on launching monthly subscriptions to Full Self-Driving by 2021, announced Elon Musk in a recent tweet. He broke the news after setting an updated timeframe for FSD beta’s ~$2,000 price increase on Thursday, October 29.
A subscription service would make FSD more affordable to Tesla owners because drivers could opt to use the service only when necessary. From a consumer’s perspective, FSD might be worth buying if it’s bound to be used often. However, a subscription service might be more practical for drivers who won’t use Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite daily and only need it during long drives or trips.
An FSD subscription service would not only benefit customers though. It would also benefit Tesla, specifically its AI team. The more data and driving experience FSD’s AI gathers, after all, the better it will perform.
With this in mind, making FSD as accessible as possible to Tesla owners should be a key priority for the company. Elon Musk predicted that FSD could be worth more than $100,000 one day. To reach that price point, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving capabilities would need to improve dramatically. More real-world driving data means that more improvements could be made.
Tesla’s subscription service has been in the works for some time. EV enthusiast @greentheonly spotted the first signs of a possible FSD subscription service drop while sifting through Tesla’s code in April earlier this year.
“[T]here’s code for pay as you go subscription plan, has been for quite a while. Waiting for that eventual time when it will make sense I am sure,” green tweeted then.
Two days after the owner-hacker talked about the code for Tesla’s FSD subscription plan, Elon Musk and Zachary Kirkhorn confirmed the news during TSLA’s Q1 2020 earnings call. “I think we will offer Full Self-Driving as a subscription service, but it will be probably toward the end of this year,” answered Elon Musk noted.
Musk added that buying Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite at full price might be a better investment. “I should say, it will still make sense as — to buy FSD as an option as, in our view, buying FSD is an investment in the future. And we are confident that it is an investment that will pay off to the consumer — to the benefit of the consumer. In my opinion, buying FSD option is something people will not regret doing,” he said.”
However, Musk was not wrong about perceiving FSD as an investment. In July 2020, a few months after the Q1 earnings call, Tesla raised the price of FSD from $7000 to $8000. After the FSD price increase, Musk reminded the public that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software would increase in value every few months. “Those who buy it earlier will see the benefit,” he noted.
Musk held true to his word. Tesla recently released its limited Full Self-Driving beta, which is expected to feature improvements from the highly-anticipated Autopilot rewrite. Based on recent real-world tests of Tesla’s improved FSD suite, the EV automaker has made leaps and bounds in the development of its self-driving driving software.
Corresponding to Tesla’s FSD beta was another price increase, merely months after the $1,000 raise in July 2020. Yesterday, Elon Musk announced Tesla would increase the price of FSD by ~$2,000, bringing it up to $10,000. Given the dramatic changes seen in Tesla’s limited FSD beta, the price increase makes sense to some.
However, it does also makes FSD less affordable to others. A subscription service for FSD would make Tesla’s autonomous software more accessible to those who aren’t willing to or can’t shell out $10,000 or more upfront.
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
