Tesla currently charges owners $10,600 CAD (or $10,000 USD) to upgrade to the Full Self-Driving (FSD) package. The price has risen considerably in recent years, and is only expected to increase as the company releases the self-driving on city streets feature, hopefully later this year.
The high price point, and several delays to Elon Musk’s promises that true FSD was coming soon, has led many to believe the number of people buying the expensive software upgrade has been declining.
Tesla has never released official figures on how many people opt to purchase FSD. A crowd sourced order tracker has now given us our best estimate at that number.
According to data complied from more than 17,000 customers by Tesla delivery tracker @TroyTeslike, the “take rate” of FSD in Q2 2021 was just 11.1%.
That is down from 24.9% in the same quarter in 2021, and down from the all-time high of 46.0% in Q2 2019.
While the FSD take rate in Q2 2019 appears high, there is a good reason for it.
Before this period Tesla offered an Enhanced Autopilot (EAP) upgrade as well as the FSD upgrade. Both included the same feature set, but only buyers of the FSD package would be getting newly released features moving forward.
Tesla then cancelled the EAP option, making Autopilot standard on all vehicles and moving all the advanced driver-assist features in EAP to FSD.
The big drops in FSD take rate coincide with when Tesla increased the price of the FSD package, nearly doubling it from $6,000 in early 2019 to $10,000 in October 2020.
Additional data from Troy shows Model S and Model X buyers in North America are the most likely to buy FSD, followed by Model Y buyers and then Model 3 buyers.
