Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite to see $1K price increase with Enhanced Summon wide release

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has announced that the electric car maker’s Full Self-Driving suite, which currently includes features such as Navigate on Autopilot, Auto Lane Change, Autopark, and Summon, will increase in price by $1,000 on August 16. Musk also echoed a point he mentioned earlier this year, which points to the cost of FSD increasing “every few months.”

Considering that Tesla will be raising the price of its Full Self-Driving suite, Musk noted that the company would be releasing a new, impressive autonomous feature at around the same time. “That’s approximately (the) date when we expect Enhanced Summon to be in wide release. It will be magical. Lot of hard work by Autopilot team,” Musk wrote. 

The release of Enhanced Summon has proven particularly elusive for Tesla, which has been working on the feature intensively since the previous year.  In a series of tweets, Musk explained that the new Summon feature, which allows vehicles to navigate a parking lot without any input from the driver, is a challenging problem to solve. Just last Saturday, Musk mentioned that Tesla is doing an “in-depth engineering review of Enhanced Summon” to address how vehicles handle parking lots. 

Despite the delays in Enhanced Summon’s release, Musk did state that Tesla has been making good progress in refining the system, which would be one of the company’s Full Self-Driving features that will actually be offered to customers as such. The CEO, for example, stated that Tesla has made “good progress on fast activation of Summon down to ~1 second” and that the top speed of Enhanced Summon would probably be around 5 mph, far quicker than the 2 mph implemented in early releases of the feature.

With all the work that Tesla is performing in its efforts to release a version of Enhanced Summon that is designed to impress, it appears that the FSD price increase resulting from the feature’s expected wide release could very well be justified. Once Tesla figures out parking lots for Enhanced Summon, after all, the company could work on even more advanced capabilities, such as navigating multi-story parking lots and the ability to send off an electric car to park itself. 

Tesla is making a significant play in the autonomous driving market. Elon Musk has noted that the technology, coupled with the potential of the Tesla Network’s Robotaxi service, will actually make Tesla’s vehicles appreciating assets due to the vehicles’ capability to generate revenue for their owners. Musk estimates that with full self-driving capabilities, a Tesla could be worth between $100,000 to $200,000, especially with the increasing price of the company’s Full Self-Driving suite.