Tesla is taking away some of the best features from its cars. At the same time, getting them back will cost more per month than ever. Autosteer, a crucial part of the Autopilot package that lets the car center itself in-lane, has been removed from the Model 3 and Model Y, reports InsideEVs. This leaves Tesla’s best-selling vehicles without a feature you can find on even the most basic new cars from other automakers.
The EV company first cut Autosteer from the Autopilot package when it launched the Standard trim models last October. At that time, higher-spec models continued to offer the feature, but it’s now gone from all of them.
When Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company was killing the Autopilot feature completely, it seemed to be leaving Autosteer. InsideEVs took a dive into the company’s updated website, and found that while early stages in the ordering process showed Autosteer as included, the last step makes it clear the feature is missing. Instead of the lane-centering feature, Model 3 and Model Y only include adaptive cruise control as standard.
If you want any more advanced features, you can’t even tick the box for Autopilot. You need to order Full Self-Driving, which is an $8,000 one-time purchase that is going away next month. Or you need to pay the $99 per month subscription fee. A fee that Musk said will increase.
From Tesla’s site, Autopilot is a suite of advanced driver assistance features. It includes Autopark, which can park in parallel or perpendicular spaces, Summon, which is meant to bring the car across parking lots, Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (adaptive cruise control), Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control (which adds stopping for lights to TACC) Full Self-Driving (Supervised), and Autosteer. With the exception of FSD, all had been standard on Tesla vehicles for around seven years. Now they’re a massive extra cost.
Autosteer itself is the feature that “maintains your speed and distance from a leading vehicle while also intelligently keeping [the vehicle] in its lane.” Automatic lane changes and Navigate on Autopilot are part of it.
Tesla is offering some big deals and reintroducing FSD transfers, but for how long is unclear.
Lane centering isn’t mandated by the NHTSA, and it’s not part of the IIHS list of tests. But it is a significant safety feature, and removing it also removes the reduction of the driving burden lane centering offers. On top of that, automatic lane changes and Navigate on Autpilot were big-deal convenience features for Tesla owners.
Since it’s not legislated, the feature isn’t standard on every car. Still, you’ll find it on almost all mass-market vehicles these days. Even the most basic Hyundai Elantra comes standard with the feature, and its $22,625 price is more than $10,000 less than a Model 3.
As it stands, without the FSD subscription, which switches to monthly-only on February 14, the only advanced driver assist on a Model 3 or Y is traffic-aware cruise control. On its site, Tesla doesn’t list blind-spot monitoring, automatic emergency braking, or forward collision avoidance assist as being available on the two, all features you’ll find standard on a base Toyota Corolla.
With FSD, you get those features back, along with a hands-off driver assist system. Tesla isn’t the first to charge for hands-off driving, but GM and Ford include multiple years free at purchase and the Super Cruise plan is $40 per month. Plus, if you don’t pay the Super Cruise fee, you still get all the other driver assists.
You also get the eternal promise that fully autonomous driving is coming. Musk has been promising it was just around the corner since 2015. When confirming the latest changes, he said that when FSD can finally fully self-drive, there will be even more increases.
A fixed shade and $10,000 are all that’s separating the Standard roof from a Premium.
In October, Tesla’s CFO said that just 12% of customers were paying for FSD. With Musk’s $1 trillion pay package needing 10 million active subscribers, this is one very obvious way to help give the numbers a bump. The bigger question, however, is how many current or future Tesla customers he will drive away in the process.
Source: InsideEVs
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