On Sunday, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla announced that the electric vehicle maker would raise the price of its premium Full Self Driving or FSD driver assistance system by $3000 on September 5, this year. Earlier, the system was available for $12,000 and the new price would be 15,000 which is a 25 percent increase by Tesla. There has been no mention of an increase in the cost of subscriptions of FSD, as yet. It is currently $199 per month.
New Tesla vehicles have Autopilot, which is a standard driver assistance program. Some of its features include “Traffic Aware Cruise Control” and “Autosteer.” However, FSD has more advanced features such as “Traffic and Stop Sign Control” and “Navigate on Autopilot.”
Tesla will also rollout version 10.69, which is a new version of its Beta software. This will let everyday drivers test the features in the new driver assistance system on public roads, prior to being fully debugged.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) as well as the California Department of Motor Vehicles are critical of these features that have also drawn regulatory scrutiny.
Since 2016, the NHTSA has been probing 38 collisions in which Autopilot or its more advanced systems were considered to be factors that might have led to these collisions. To date, 19 fatalities have been reported as part of these collisions where Tesla vehicles were involved.
California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has also accused the electric vehicle maker of deception in marketing its products. The DMV is conducting a technical review of driver assistance systems of Tesla, including FSD Beta.
Meanwhile Tesla continues marketing its systems, without data about its systems being made available to third-party researchers, who can confirm its claims.
This weekend, Ashok Elluswamy, who is Tesla’s director of Autopliot software, claimed on Twitter that Autopilot prevented 40 crashes per day “where human drivers mistakenly press the accelerator at 100% instead of the brakes.”
(Photo Credit:AdrianHancu )
U.S. opens  formal investigation probing Autopilot problems on 765,000 Tesla vehicles
