The Miami Design District has a showroom floor with a Model Y electric vehicle.
The price of the Full Self-Driving package will be raised from $10,000 to $12,000 on January 17 for customers in the U.S. only.
In a series of posts, Musk wrote that the price of the company's stock rose to $12k on January 17. Just in the US. As we get closer to the production code release, the price of FSD will rise.
When a follower asked if the monthly subscription price would go up when the product went to wide release, Musk said it would. He teased a new release of the invitation-only program, which offers more advanced features to select drivers who meet the qualifications of the company.
In its earnings reports, the company doesn't reveal how many of its customers pay up-front or subscribe to the service. It is not clear how much a price hike in the U.S. will bolster its margins in the future.
The company's standard driver assistance package is marketed as autopilot and comes standard with all of its new vehicles.
According to the website of the company, autopilot includes but is not limited to automatic emergency braking, forward collision warning, lane keeping and adaptive cruise control, which matches the speed of your car to that of the surrounding traffic.
The Full-Self Driving option is a premium package that includes the autopilot functions, as well as more sophisticated features like automatic lane-changing, stop light recognition, and "smart summon" which lets drivers call their car from a parking spot to come pick them up. It doesn't allow cars to drive themselves automatically with no driver intervention.
There is also an FSDBeta tier, which has even more advanced features.
Musk said on Friday that a new 10.9 release is nearing completion.
Only drivers who receive high marks in a "safety score" from the company can get access to the free trial. Once they are in, they will be able to test unfinished features like autosteer on city streets, which will eventually enable drivers to navigate around residential and urban surface streets, avoiding all obstacles, without having to steer on their own.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are looking into different aspects of the development of the technology.
The agencies have been told that the technology is only a level 2 system. Level 2 systems are not capable of driving or operating the vehicle without the active physical control or monitoring of a human.
Musk implied that the company's technology is more advanced than level 2. In an interview published on December 28, 2021, Musk was asked when he thought the company would solve Level 4. It looks like it will be next year, meaning 2022.
The company hasn't demonstrated the hands-free drive across the US that Musk said would be possible by the end of the year.
