Jan. 23, 2026 1:22 pm EST Tesla Tesla You can't trust Elon Musk half as far as you can throw him, so as usual, take everything he says with a grain of salt big enough to preserve an entire school of cod, but the Tesla CEO also said on Twitter that you can expect the cost of an FSD subscription to get more expensive "as FSD's capabilities improve." In theory, that kind of statement should encourage people to get in early, but since FSD is moving to a subscription model, he's mostly just advertising that the $99 a month he plans to charge is merely an introductory price, and you'll end up paying more later if you join now. Meanwhile, believing the promise that FSD's capabilities will see any meaningful improvement that might possibly justify paying more than $99 a month requires trusting the guy who's been promising that full autonomy for more than a decade without delivering it. But you never know, maybe this time, it's for real. Maybe this time it's definitely happening. Tesla's going to figure out how to make a camera-only system compete with far-superior lidar-based systems, Patrick Rothfuss is finally going to publish "The Doors Of Stone," Leonardo DiCaprio's going to date an age-appropriate woman, and I'm going to go through a midlife growth spurt and finally be six feet tall. Whether any of that ever happens or not, though, Musk has to find a way to get a bunch of people to pay for FSD subscriptions if he ever wants to hit the targets laid out in his $1 trillion pay package. And who doesn't love feeling like a company is squeezing you for more money, just so a billionaire CEO can juice his numbers and get yet another multi-billion-dollar payout. Enjoyed this read? Join our newsletter for the top auto news sent straight to your inbox, and add us as a preferred source on Google! Recommended