Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

Re:Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/mont... by jaggederest on Friday January 23, 2026 @04:11PM (#46737983)

The reason is a very simple one - predicting future revenue is extremely difficult if you're selling an $X package one time (even with upgrades etc), but knowing that you have Y subscribers with a $Z subscription and a churn rate of N% gives you some kind of future forecast.

Anything you can do to operationalize cash flows is a huge boon to continuity of business operations

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/mont... by CuriouslyC on Friday January 23, 2026 @04:34PM (#46738231)

There's also the fact that people are bad about cancelling when they don't use them, and it makes it easy to jack up prices.

I don't argue that they're great from a predatory business perspective. The consistency you state comes on the back of negative value for customers though. Particularly now that everything is a subscription. People are worn TF out by keeping track of the people hoovering their money away.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/mont... by jaggederest on Friday January 23, 2026 @10:00PM (#46740653)

Yeah personally I think it's absolutely awful and a clear example of the way that financialization has negatively affected a lot of things these days, but if you're in that mindset the reasoning is perfectly clear and valid - it's just lacking the larger picture.

[ Parent | on HN ]