Tesla has discontinued its basic driver-assistance system, Autopilot, as the company seeks to accelerate adoption of a more advanced version of the technology, which it calls “fully autonomous driving (with supervision).”
The decision comes as the company faces a 30-day suspension of its manufacturing and dealer licenses in California, the country’s largest market. A judge ruled in December that Tesla had engaged in deceptive marketing for years by exaggerating the capabilities of Autopilot and FSD. The California DMV, which filed the lawsuit first and has a say on the license, put the ruling on hold for 60 days to allow Tesla to comply by removing the Autopilot name.
Autopilot was a combination of traffic-aware cruise control, which maintains a specified speed while maintaining distance from the vehicle in front, and autosteer, a lane centering feature that allows the vehicle to maneuver around curves.
Tesla’s online configuration site currently states that new cars only come standard with traffic-aware cruise control. It is unclear whether current customers are affected.
The decision comes a week after the company announced it would stop charging a one-time $8,000 fee for FSD software starting February 14th. After that, customers will only be able to access FSD through a $99 monthly subscription. However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote in a post Thursday that subscription prices will increase as the software improves in functionality.
Musk said he believes Tesla’s new cars will be capable of “unsupervised” driving, and that advancements in FSD will allow drivers to “be on their phones or asleep for the entire ride.” He said in December that while texting while driving is illegal in nearly every state, the new version of FSD allows the former.
On Thursday, Tesla introduced its Model Y SUV in Austin, Texas, the first robotaxi version without a human safety supervisor inside the vehicle. These vehicles run a more advanced version of the company’s driving software and are still tracked by the company’s fleet for surveillance.
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Tesla launched a beta version of its fully self-driving software in late 2020, but implementation has always been slower than executives like Musk had hoped. In October 2025, Tesla’s Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said that only 12% of all Tesla customers paid for the software. Achieving “10 million active FSD subscriptions” by 2035 is one of the key “product goals” Musk needs to reach in order to receive the full amount of his new $1 trillion salary package.
Tesla first introduced Autopilot in the early 2010s after negotiations between Mr. Musk and Google to leverage technology being developed by then-upstart search giant Tesla’s self-driving division (which was eventually spun off into Waymo) collapsed. Tesla equipped all its vehicles with driver assistance systems as standard equipment in April 2019.
For more than a decade since Autopilot has existed, Tesla has struggled to communicate the software’s capabilities. The company often overpromised and made its technology appear more capable than it actually was, leading some drivers to overconfident its capabilities, resulting in hundreds of crashes and at least 13 deaths, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
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