Tesla is abandoning Autopilot in order to boost the launch of its self-driving software.

Tesla is he stopped Autopilot, its driver assistance system, while the company is trying to advance the implementation of the advanced technology it calls Full Self-Driving (Supervisor).

The decision comes as the company faces a 30-day suspension of its manufacturing and sales licenses in its largest US market, California. A judge ruled in December that Tesla was involved fraudulent sales by adding Autopilot and FSD capabilities over the years. The California DMV, which brought the case in the first place and has a say in the permits, stayed the decision for 60 days to allow Tesla to comply and drop the Autopilot name.

Autopilot was a combination of Traffic Aware Cruise Control, which sticks to a set speed while maintaining distance and traffic ahead, and Autosteer, which is in the middle of the road and can steer the car around.

Tesla’s online configuration page now says that new cars will now only come with Traffic Aware Cruise Control. It is unclear whether current customers are affected.

The decision comes a week after the company announced that starting February 14will waive the $8,000 one-time fee for the FSD program. After that, customers will be able to access FSD only with a monthly subscription of $99 – even Tesla CEO Elon Musk he wrote in the post Thursday that the cost of registration will increase as the program’s capabilities improve.

Musk believes that Tesla’s new cars will be able to drive “unsupervised”, saying that advances in FSD will allow drivers to “stay on your phone or sleep the entire journey.” In December, he said the new version of FSD allows the old one, however texting while driving is illegal in almost all countries.

On Thursday, Tesla released Early versions of robotaxi of its Model Y SUVs in Austin, Texas that do not have human safety inspectors in the vehicles. Those cars are running the company’s most advanced software, and they are still followed by company cars to be monitored.

Tesla launched a beta version of its Full Self-Driving program in late 2020, but the launch has not always been behind the expectations of executives like Musk. In October 2025, Tesla’s chief financial officer Vaibhav Taneja he said Only 12% of all Tesla customers paid for the program. Hitting “10 million FSD subscriptions” by 2035 is one of the most important “business goals” necessary for Musk to receive the full salary of his new $1 trillion package.

Tesla introduced Autopilot in the early 2010s after the news between Musk and Google to advance the technology being developed by the giant’s autonomous driving group (which eventually spun off into Waymo). Tesla has developed a system to help the driver be more stable all of its vehicles in April 2019.

During the decade-plus of Autopilot’s existence, Tesla struggled to explain the program’s capabilities. The company often over-promised and made the technology seem more capable than it actually was, leading to overconfidence in some drivers, leading to hundreds of accidents and at least 13 deaths. according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.