Tesla India No Longer Offering Full Self Driving Package for Purchase, Subscription Coming Soon

Just ahead of its first anniversary in India, Tesla has removed the option on its website to configure a Model Y with its Full Self Driving suite. The page now says "subscription coming soon", but prices and availability have not yet been announced.

Although not yet usable in India, the company began selling FSD as a ₹6 lakh add-on with new Model Y purchases at the time of the car’s launch on July 15 last year. At the time, Tesla India told ACKO Drive that the feature would be coming to India soon, but declined to specify a timeline. FSD was still available as a one-time purchase option at the time of the Tesla Model Y L launch in April this year.

ACKO Drive has reached out to Tesla India to ask about the removal and the status of its planned FSD rollout in India, and will update this article when we receive a response.

Is Full Self Driving coming to India soon? 

Unofficial FSD enthusiast community notanfsdtracker.com shows no sign of the feature being tested or launched here in the near future. However, the @wholemars Tesla fan account on X has published a map, purportedly presented by Tesla’s VP of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy at a conference on autonomous driving in early June. According to this map, India is one of several countries now designated “pending regulatory approval”, indicating that the company could actively be in talks with government authorities here.

As early as May last year, official Tesla India job postings for Autopilot test drivers surfaced online. Disguised test cars were also spotted around the country, likely conducting surveys and gathering data to help localise the company’s assisted and autonomous driving capabilities. However, there has been no official news about a launch.

FSD: One-time purchase vs subscription 

Tesla dispensed with the option to purchase FSD outright in the US in January this year, with several other markets following suit. The package costs $99 USD per month (approximately ₹9,436) before taxes, as opposed to the $8,000 (approximately ₹7,62,520) one-time purchase that had been available for several years. 

Although treated as an optional upgrade, the company did not previously allow FSD purchases to transfer in case a car was sold to a new owner, in many cases. Subscription ties the service to a user account, not the car itself, and also gives Tesla a recurring revenue stream. As per recent software updates, Tesla is also experimenting with facial recognition to authenticate FSD users, suggesting that further changes are likely such as restricting how many people can share one subscription, or allowing FSD to carry over to a rental or borrowed car.

Changing to a subscription model in India is therefore in line with the company's global operations, and does not necessarily indicate an imminent launch here.

Tesla FSD: How it works and where it's launching next

Unlike many of its competitors, Tesla does not use radar and Lidar sensors for spatial awareness and object detection, instead relying only on cameras, which it says is analogue to human vision. The paid FSD package enables a higher degree of autonomy than the Autopilot feature, which is included with each Tesla car purchase.

Tesla says over 1.3 million vehicles around the world are equipped with FSD, including its expanding Robotaxi fleet. That number should jump significantly, as mass production of the fully autonomous Cybercab has begun. The company ecently began offering FSD in The Netherlands, Lithuania and Estonia, in its first major expansion outside North America, Australia, and China. Road trials are ongoing in Finland, Spain, France, and Germany, with the company also currently targeting the entire EU, Chile, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Japan, Taiwan, and several other countries in addition to India.