In the summer of 2021, Tesla offered its customers a subscription to a “full autonomy” service for its electric vehicles. If previously you had to buy a package of functions and pay $10,000 for it one time, now it is available for $199 per month.
Is the new service worth paying two hundred dollars a month for?
Here it’s worth mentioning right away that this autopilot is not “complete”. Moreover, this point of view is shared by the company itself: as reported by the automotive web publication Ars Technica, “Tesla does not consider FSD to be a complete autopilot and does not intend to make it such in the foreseeable future.”
The second caveat concerns safety when driving an electric vehicle with Full Self-Driving mode enabled: the set of functions remains auxiliary, the main role is still played by the driver. “Autopilot” is currently in beta testing status, which means you should use it carefully.
What can “full autopilot” do?
The feature package includes the following supporting functions:
- Automatic lane change, selection of the best lane;
- self parking;
- stop on red;
- identification of road signs through the navigator;
- identification of obstacles on the road – pedestrians, oncoming and passing cars;
- Summon – calling a car in a parking lot using a mobile application.
The last feature is especially interesting. It allows you to call a car to your location if, for example, you arrive at a huge hypermarket parking lot… and forget where you parked. The car will approach you without a driver inside.
It is worth noting that the option will be especially useful if you ordered a Tesla from the USA : on these cars, Summon works at a distance of 50 meters. While for European EVs this value is 6 meters.