Tesla Says 75% Of New Car Buyers Subscribe To FSD In North America

Tesla's newest subscription numbers show that 75% of buyers subscribe to Tesla's $99 per month autonomy software.

Photo by: Tesla

By: Rob Stumpf

Oct 21, at 7:39pm ET

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Tesla is selling FSD like crazy in North America.
75% of those buyers also purchase Tesla's $99 per month FSD subscription with it.
That marks a whopping 1.74 million FSD subscribers worldwide.

Tesla has spent years arguing that the most valuable part of its cars isn't the vehicle itself, but the software that underpins its autonomy. Now Tesla is crediting its self-driving prowess as the biggest contributing factor behind its largest vehicle order backlog in four years.

According to the automaker, Full Self-Driving is the secret sauce that makes its brand so desirable. In fact, it says that FSD is behind most of recent customer demand, with most new car buyers coupling their vehicle purchase with a paid subscription to FSD.

Photo by: Tesla

Tesla says that 75% of its new vehicle deliveries in North America included FSD last quarter. That number is up from 55% in Q2 and is an astonishingly high attach rate for a $99 per month add-on, especially when consumers as a whole largely reject automotive subscriptions.

That number shows that Tesla has been steadily increasing the number of subscribers contributing to software-based annual recurring revenue. It now reports 1.74 million FSD subscriptions across its fleet—that's up 67% year-over-year, and, no, that's not counting free trials.

"Every car that we are delivering comes with a month of FSD subscription," said Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's VP of AI Software. "But still people are signing up even though they have that free [month] available."

Notably, that million subscriber figure also includes those who purchased FSD as a one-time purchase. However, Tesla also revealed that it finally crossed the 50% threshold for purchases versus subscriptions. That means 875,000 people around the world are paying Tesla $99 per month for FSD (or about $1.04 billion in revenue per year if the number of FSD subscribers doesn't decrease).

Tesla isn't saying how long those drivers stay subscribed to FSD. It says that it will share more data like churn rates in the future, but is being fairly tight-lipped about that data as it seeks regulatory approval to turn on FSD in overseas markets like Europe and China.

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There's still a qualifier attached to the FSD nameplate: "Supervised." Tesla teased that it will soon be ready to roll out unsupervised FSD to buyers by next summer—with an asterisk, of course. FSD will remain geofenced to approved markets, and only in cars with the latest and greatest hardware. It also plans to welcome customer cars onto the Tesla robotaxi network around the same time.

More importantly, it's finally starting to look less like Tesla pushing FSD as some sort of future promise and more like a feature that buyers not only want, but believe will still mature into a true autonomous driving product.