Tesla Kills Autopilot in the United States; Full Self-Driving Will Soon Be Subscription-Only

• Autopilot is dead in the United States.
• Every Tesla will now come with Traffic-Aware Cruise Control.
• Don't worry — for $99 a month, you can get Full Self-Driving instead!

Autopilot is dead in the United States. Every Tesla will now come standard with Traffic-Aware Cruise Control, the company's branded name for adaptive cruise control. New Teslas will not come with lane keeping assistance. Autopilot was the combination of lane keeping, aka "autosteer," and adaptive cruise control, but the feature bundle is no more. 

The only way to get a similar feature set is to spring for Tesla's Full Self-Driving feature. It was just an optional extra, but on February 15, Tesla will no longer sell FSD as an $8,000 add-on to your vehicle. Instead, the software will now be subscription-only, and buyers will have to come up with an extra $99 a month for the service.

For the math averse, nearly 81 months (6.7 years) of subscribing to Full Self-Driving gets you to that $8,000 figure. While FSD is more feature-rich than Autopilot, it's very much still in beta. And, as you probably know, it is still not autonomous driving despite various Elon Musk promises over the years. 

We're not sure Full Self-Driving was worth the $8,000 it cost to get it equipped on the Model Y we bought for our One-Year Road Test fleet. We're much less certain that it will be worth a monthly subscription. Musk also noted that the subscription price of FSD will increase as its capabilities improve. 

Full Self-Driving will still come included in Tesla's premium models, the Model S, Model X and the Cyberbeast version of the Cybertruck. This impacts buyers of the two most popular Tesla models: the Model 3 and the Model Y. 

Meanwhile, our European friends still get Basic Autopilot with the purchase of every new Tesla and have the option of buying Enhanced Autopilot, which includes most of the features I'd want in a new Tesla. Alas, in the United States, the vast majority of Tesla buyers will have just two choices: Full Self-Driving or nothing.