As its sales continue to slip and its robotaxi strategy seems to falter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said today that the company would stop selling its Full Self-Driving feature as a standalone package. Instead, starting on February 14th, the Level 2 driver assist system would be offered as a monthly subscription only. The news marks a massive shift in how Tesla markets FSD, a software system that Musk has long claimed would lead to fully autonomous vehicles and thus would be an "appreciating asset."
Since last year, however, Alphabet's robotaxi service has begun to scale up quickly. It's now fully open to the public in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area. And today the company is announcing that it's testing fully autonomous trips, sans human driver, in Miami, and plans to do so in Orlando, Florida; Dallas; Houston; and San Antonio in the coming weeks.