Customers lament Tesla’s move toward monthly fees for self-driving cars: “You will own nothing and be happy”

https://fortune.com/2026/01/15/tesla-self-driving-car-subscription/

31 Comments

  1. Imagine still being a Tesla customer. What a bunch of fascist supporting jagoffs lining the pockets of one of the worst people alive.

  2. Fabulous_Soup_521 on

    Alienating what few customers they have left. And FSD buyers are the true believers. Captain Ketamine rides to the rescue!

  3. Beneficial_Soup3699 on

    Maybe don’t buy a nazimobile from the world’s wealthiest perpetually 15 year old edgelord, idk 🤷🏻‍♂️

  4. Elon is doing his very best to convince everyone on the planet not to buy his vehicles. Amazing!

  5. scottiedagolfmachine on

    I can’t wait to get rid of my Tesla.

    Waiting for Rivian R2 to come out this year.

  6. Bound to happen, unfortunately everyone is doing the same. Around 2022, I remember BMW sold cars with heated seats and few other features installed but required subscription to activate & use them.

  7. So, you have to pay them to use a feature on your own car and then you have to pay for the damages when this thing inevitably misidentifies a pedestrian as a paper bag.

  8. Meanie_Cream_Cake on

    Not only are vehicle prices inflating, they will add subscription based features to them. You will have to subscribe to your car to use basic features like certain speeds or heating or remote start in the future.

    These companies will do anything to squeeze and suck money from everyone.

  9. ExplanationSure8996 on

    There is a simple solution to this. Don’t buy his vehicles. The more people do that, the more likely he reverts back to the way it was. Speak with your wallet.

  10. Unpopular opinion, but this is the only way any of it makes sense. A subscription for a heated seat is dumb. It’s build-once hardware that lasts the lifetime of the car. FSD is going to require constant software updates and improvements basically forever, and there is material cost to that continued iteration. And, eventually the car will stop working because the world will have evolved to the point where the now antiquated hardware will be considered unsafe compared to the advances in newer models. If you were buying a car with a fixed set of hardware and software and it never changed I’d have much more of an issue with this. And for what it’s worth, I’d never own a Tesla, ever, but this isn’t why.

  11. NotAnotherEmpire on

    You can pay monthly for the non-existent feature you used to pay up front for and also not get. 

    I believe this is called rent seeking.

  12. Blood-PawWerewolf on

    Honestly, I think this is the only case where forcing a feature behind a subscription would make the product better since FSD has been a known safety issue for years. The less people who use it, the less likely that some innocent person/people would get severely hurt or killed

  13. Elon: what if we incentivized people to buy other EVs even more than we already were?

    Tesla shareholders: bro that’s so genius. Here’s $1 trillion.

  14. I don’t understand how he/they haven’t been the target of a class action lawsuit over the repeated lies about full self driving

  15. Curious_Party_4683 on

    Pretty sure custom firmware will be a thing by the end of the year. Forcing subscription just motivates people to jailbreak

  16. I’d never buy a Tesla and generally hate the subscriptionification of everything… but honestly, with FSD running $8k, I’d happily pay a monthly fee when going on a road trip and then canceling it the rest of the year.

  17. discordianofslack on

    Why is anyone buying these cars. Outside of Elon being a shit bag and the company being prepped up by massive stock fraud, they haven’t invested a single cent in over a decade to improve the design of the car. It’s literally the same model people have been buying forever. They were ugly then and they are still ugly now.