Tesla announced last month that it was increasing the price of its Full Self-Driving Beta option from $12,000 by $3,000, as per Elon Musk’s words. Now that change has been made official and if you want to select the FSD option today, it will cost $15,000, which is quite a lot for what is basically just access to unfinished, work-in-progress software, and you may be better off just getting Enhanced Autopilot.
Tesla reintroduced Enhanced Autopilot earlier this year and that option costs $6,000 while granting you pretty much all of the exact same features. FSD is certainly not good enough to currently justify the $9,000 difference, as Autopilot will still drive the vehicle on its own in the same instances when FSD would work well too.
Enhanced Autopilot has the ability to keep the car centered on the road, it can perform completely autonomous lane changes and it will generally do most of the steering pretty well. It also comes with a feature called Navigate on Autopilot, which basically allows the car to deal with highway on- and off-ramps, including changing lanes to reach them while indicating all lane changes without human intervention.
It also gets the Smart Summon feature, which basically allows you to call the vehicle to come to you, say, when you are leaving a shopping center and parked far from the exit, and this feature generally works quite well. Then there’s also the self-parking feature, but this is pretty much the same as what other automakers have been offering for years.
What FSD adds is the ability to enable the autonomous driving mode while in town, and it also has a system for identifying and reacting to stop signs. However, if you watch as many FSD driving videos as we do, then you will know that it is specifically in urban environments that the system has the most problems, especially if you combine city driving with heavy (and aggressive) traffic and/or more extreme weather phenomena such as snow.
