Tesla's "Full Self Driving" Worth $99/Month?

The question of whether Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” is worth $99 per month is examined through a long, personal timeline tied to hardware and pricing changes. The author says they leased a Nissan Leaf in 2014, then bought a Tesla Model 3 in 2019 and paid $6,000 for a permanent FSD license when it was offered under that name. Tesla later raised the permanent license price to $10,000 before reducing it to $8,000, then stopped selling permanent licenses and moved customers to a subscription at $99 per month. The writer recalls that in 2019 FSD worked mainly on interstates and limited-access highways, then expanded as the software evolved, including development using the “Supervised” label. They also describe shifts after Tesla introduced HW4, with more significant updates only for cars equipped with that hardware, and mention that major improvements continued until about 2024. The article provided no market-wide testing results or quantified performance metrics beyond the described rollout and pricing.