Tesla Autopilot Activation Via In-App Purchase Reduced To $2k Until July

Featured Image Credit: Tesla

Elon Musk announced that enabling basic Tesla Autopilot through the company’s in-app purchases will be reduced to USD$2,000 until July 1. This should allow owners of the company’s older vehicles to access basic Autopilot features at a very reasonable price. The announcement was posted by CEO Elon Musk on Twitter this weekend.

Today, all new vehicle orders save for the $35,000 Standard Range Model 3 are equipped with basic Autopilot, which includes Autosteer and Traffic-Aware Cruise Control. Advanced features such as Navigate on Autopilot, Auto Lane Change, Autopark, Smart Summon, and Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control, are available as a $7,000 option under the Full Self-Driving package. This did not use to be the case.

Before basic Autopilot became a standard feature for Teslas, the driver-assist suite, then dubbed as Enhanced Autopilot, was available as a $5,000 option. This meant that there were numerous vehicle orders comprising of Model 3 that were purchased without Autopilot at all. Elon Musk’s new announcement addresses this, and it could very well bring Autopilot to even more Tesla owners.

Enabling basic Tesla Autopilot via Tesla in-app purchase is reduced to $2k until July 1

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 22, 2020

A price of $2,000 for basic Autopilot, after all, is a pretty reasonable cost for the features it provides. That’s around half the price of a set of 20-inch Model 3 Sport Wheels and tires, or the same price as the Red Multi-Coat paint option. By purchasing basic Autopilot, owners could experience, at least to some degree, a notable part of the company’s driver-assist technology.

One of the best ways for Tesla to promote the automated capabilities of its vehicles is to give a preview of their actual capabilities in real-world settings. With this in mind, offering basic Autopilot at a very reasonable price could very well encourage more owners to purchase the Full Self-Driving suite, which holds the best technology that Tesla can offer today, bar none.

Tesla Autopilot and Full Self-Driving are key parts of CEO Elon Musk’s vision for the company, which is centered around the rollout of autonomous driving capabilities. For this to happen, the company has to make sure that its Full Self-Driving suite becomes feature complete. Feature complete FSD requires a lot of training data from the company’s growing fleet of vehicles, and having more cars with Autopilot should help achieve this goal.