Why Is Autopilot On A Tesla Such An Expensive Upgrade If It’S Just A Software Update?

Tesla CEO Elon Musk hinted earlier today via Twitter that he is likely to return to Enhanced Autopilot as an option for those who are interested in a more immersive semi-autonomous driving experience than Basic Autopilot, but who are not willing to shell out $12,000 for the companys most sophisticated full-self-driving package.

Autopilot On A Tesla

Many Tesla drivers who spoke to CNN Business suggested that, were they in the market today for Teslas, they would choose a monthly membership fee or buy for the more affordable Enhanced Autopilot, which brings together features such as automated parking and automated lane changes on the freeway, but is not as obviously an unfinished, flawed product.

If you were looking at their full Self-Driving Upgrade purely from a pragmatic perspective, I would say that it is difficult to justify paying for such an expensive addition to the car – for a set of capabilities that Tesla now offers now (as of November 2020).

If you do eventually sell your older Tesla and purchase a newer one — you would need to ensure that you get their Full Self Driving upgrade in that new car, too. The payment does indeed include Enhanced Autopilot features — which are now themselves priced at $6,000 — but it is primarily purchased as a pre-order of an actual autonomous driving system.

Before this, Tesla had offered the Enhanced Autopilot, which included most of the features that are now available as part of the FSD package, with the exception of a potential future ability to unlock the true full-self-driving system via a software update. As a refresher of the basic Autopilot capabilities in the Tesla, Tesla has stated its intention to offer Full Self-Driving (FSD) at some point in the future, acknowledging legal, regulatory, and technological obstacles to accomplishing that goal.

Autopilot is an advanced driver-assistance capability, Tesla said on its website, whose current version does not make vehicles autonomous.

Tesla charges customers as much as $10,000 for enhanced driver-assistance features like lane changes, promising that it will eventually bring self-driving capabilities to their cars using just cameras and enhanced software. Tesla Autopilot is a set of advanced driver assist systems features offered by Tesla, which has Lane Center, Traffic-Aware Cruise Control, Self-Parking, Automatic Lane Change, Semi-Autonomous Navigation on Limited Access Freeways, and the ability to call the car out from a garage or parking space.

Like the notion of the autonomous Autopilot, the full notion in the full-autonomous driving may ultimately prove a lie, just like it certainly did to people who bought this feature years ago: They likely would need a newer (Tesla) vehicle before the feature was fully available.