Tesla is discontinuing Autopilot in an effort to boost adoption of its full self-driving software

Tesla has discontinued Autopilot, its primary driver-assistance system, as the company tries to promote adoption of a more advanced version of the technology it calls full (supervised) self-driving.

The decision comes as the company faces a 30-day suspension of manufacturing and dealer licenses in its largest US market, California. A judge ruled last December that Tesla had engaged in deceptive marketing by exaggerating its Autopilot and FSD capabilities for years. The California Department of Motor Vehicles, which originally brought the case and has a say in the licenses, stayed the ruling for 60 days to allow Tesla to comply by dropping the Autopilot name.

Autopilot was a combination of Traffic Aware Cruise Control, which sticks to a set speed while maintaining distance to cars in front of you, and Autosteer, a lane-centered feature that can steer the car around curves.

Tesla’s online configuration site now states that new cars now only come standard with Traffic Aware Cruise Control. It is not clear whether existing customers are affected.

This decision comes one week after the company announced that as of February 14, it will stop charging a one-time $8,000 fee for FSD software. After that, customers will only be able to access FSD through a $99 monthly subscription — though Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote in a post on Thursday that the subscription price will increase as the software’s capabilities improve.

Musk believes Tesla’s newer cars will be capable of “unsupervised” driving, saying advances in FSD will allow drivers to “stay on your phone or sleep the entire ride.” In December, he said a new version of the FSD allowed the former, even though texting while driving is illegal in almost all states.

Tesla on Thursday rolled out the first versions of its Robotic Taxi Model Y SUVs in Austin, Texas, which do not have staff to monitor human safety in the cars. These vehicles operate with a more advanced version of the company’s driving software, and the company’s cars still follow them for supervision.

Tesla launched the beta version of its full self-driving software in late 2020, but its adoption has consistently lagged behind the expectations of executives like Musk. In October 2025, Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja said that only 12% of all Tesla customers had paid for the program. Achieving “10 million active FSD subscriptions” by 2035 is one of the key “product goals” required for Musk to receive full payment for his new trillion-dollar pay package.

Tesla first introduced Autopilot in early 2010 after talks between Musk and Google to leverage technology developed by the search giant’s nascent self-driving division (which eventually spun off into Waymo) collapsed. Tesla made the driver assistance system standard on all of its cars in April 2019.

Over the course of more than a decade of Autopilot’s existence, Tesla has struggled to communicate the software’s capabilities. The company often overpromised and made the technology seem more capable than it was, leading some drivers to become overconfident in its abilities, which in turn led to hundreds of accidents and at least 13 deaths, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.