The one-month free FSD trial is no longer being offered to used car buyers on Tesla’s website. The tab for searching on vehicles with lifetime FSD installed has also disappeared.
https://www.tesla.com/inventory/used/my?PaymentType=cash
Perhaps this means we’ll see a big FSD price increase upon the imminent approval of FSD for commercial robotaxi use?
intercst
Or that they don’t think they can’t accomplish FSD after all and have given up.
I doubt that. There’s still money to be made selling “Supervised FSD”. My vehicle downloaded the latest update yesterday.
Musk has a habit of making the doubters look like idiots – just look at the way he’s running circles around Boeing in manned space flight. And I saw just yesterday that the Boring Company (Musk’s tunneling outfit) is being asked to bid on a $6 Billion Amtrak contract.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/technology/elon-musk-boring-company-amtrak.html
intercst
You are going with the subscription model. So do they have to upgrade your car to HW4 or since you don’t own FSD can they refuse to upgrade?
No. I don’t currently have an FSD subscription (my free trial expired 2 weeks ago.) But the vehicle gets the software updates nonetheless.
As Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton warns – AI is improving and expanding at an exponential pace. Musk may have FSD working on a smartphone – HW4 may not be required.
intercst
Yea he has been getting a lot of contracts lately. I wonder if it has anything to do with his ties to Trump.
Another possibility that fits the data is that Tesla doesn’t think it’s economically valuable to have FSD on older Teslas.
The entire purpose of the trial period is to try to increase the take rate of FSD. You give people a sample, and hopefully they like it so much that they’re willing to buy the product. Similarly, the only reason that Tesla would sell used cars with FSD already active on them would be to earn revenue on a higher sale price - letting you screen for them allows consumers to intentionally choose an FSD car, and thus choose the higher price.
So why would they stop doing that? There’s your explanation - that they think FSD will be so much more valuable in June than now that they don’t want to sell FSD at current prices. But the other possible explanation is that the obligations that come with FSD are economically problematic in older cars. If, for example, Tesla has determined that FSD actually does require the front bumper camera or HW4/5 in order to function properly, they might decide that selling used cars with the promise of FSD is a less than economical proposition.
It looks like they have done this before.
Tesla has done this in the past (removing FSD from used vehicles). While it may seem counterintuitive, they can actually then sell those vehicles at a lower cost by taking FSD off; effectively, it’s another demand lever they can pull to boost sales.
Makes sense. Wonder why they would exclude the used vehicles from the trial month, though.
Apparently 98% of used Tesla buyers with the one-month free FSD trial don’t continue with a paid subscription. (I’m one of them.)
GM charges $300/year for a Super Cruise subscription. I’d probably be willing to pay that for the current supervised Tesla FSD, but not their current rate of $1,000/year or $100/month.
About 20% of GM owners with Super Cruise continue their subscription after the free trial.
intercst
I have wondered about this, or something like it. Detroit (and Japan) have made much of outdating their older cars with new tech and whiz bang additions (as well as styling) so people trade up to new ones.
Tesla, by contrast, keeps updating older cars to they are nearly identical to new ones, obviating the need for consumers to trade up. After all, if I can get all the same whistles and bells on a 4 year old car, why buy another?
(It’s also possible that the decision has been made not to allow FSD because of a change in equipment over the years - the forward middle video camera, for example.)
But yeah, the “planned obsolescence” takes a hit, but then so does the guy who tried to thwart it. Big selling point at first, I suppose, maybe not so much later on.
I just spent some more time on Tesla’s website. It looks like Tesla is varying the freebies on used cars with the sales price.
For example, there’s a $26,400 Model Y Performance with just a 1-month Premium Connectivity trial, and a $33,600 Model Y Performance with 3-month freebies for Premium Connectivity, FSD, and Supercharging.
https://www.tesla.com/my/order/5YJYGDEF1MF261065?range=200&titleStatus=used&redirect=no#overview
intercst
Depends on the specific doubts though, right? Boring Company announced they were in talks for lots of projects, some of which they featured on their website, all of which except the Vegas Loop have gone away.
And the Vegas loop is a joke. It really isn’t a true people mover more of a vanity project.
Maybe. But it could also mean something else. Last year, when they updated everyone’s software to FSD 13.X (from 12.whatever), they gave everyone a 1-month free trial. So, it is possible that they are going to release a large update of FSD software and are planning on giving a 1-month free trial at that point (to everyone).
Some people think there will be two versions of FSD, one standard supervised FSD as exists today, and another unsupervised FSD (“robotaxi”) that will cost more. I’m not so sure if Tesla wants to maintain two separate threads of software forever, but it is plausible.
I think Tesla FSD may be currently priced out of the market. Like I wrote above, if GM Super Cruise is $300/yr, Tesla’s current FSD isn’t worth $1,000/yr.
intercst
I don’t think so. Tesla FSD has WAY more functionality than GM SuperCruise. Tesla FSD literally will take me from my driveway to almost anywhere, all I do is enter the address and press the blue button. Then it pulls out of the driveway (backwards or forwards as appropriate), turns onto the street, continues out of the development, and gets on local roads, stops at lights, turns, merges, changes lanes, etc. Enters the highway, drives, exits the highway, proceeds to destination. And sometimes it even parks itself in the parking lot there! Tesla FSD is almost like a chauffeur. GM SuperCruise only does a very small subset of those things.
Also, Tesla FSD subscription costs $1,188/year, not $1,000/year.