The Tesla Autopilot’s full self-driving package, currently valued at $7,000 or $6,400, will go up about $1,000 on July 1.
The company has increased prices in the past as vehicles acquire more features and enhancements. They recently activated the ability to come to a complete stop against STOP signals and traffic lights.
Elon Musk has warned on different occasions that the price of the autonomous driving package would gradually rise coinciding with significant improvements in the vehicle’s capabilities.
Theoretically, the Tesla would be able to go much faster after they started building the vehicles with 3.0 hardware. It was a fundamental part of the strategy to achieve autonomous driving at the end of 2019.
Unkept promises.
Unfortunately, that did not happen. Elon Musk later explained that part of the reason is related to the need to rewrite all the Autopilot code to adapt it to 3.0 hardware. Tesla has stopped giving specific dates of when they will be able to drive themselves.
Some experts are optimistic and believe that they will be able to achieve it in a few months. Ohers believe that it will not happen in less than 5 to 10 years, even more.
Both Musk and Tesla have promised that the company’s vehicles would be able to drive themselves fully automatically for about five years without it happening.
The strategy of gradually raising the price to a feature named after something the vehicles are not yet capable of doing has also been met with harsh criticism.