Tesla Paywalls Lane Centering: What It Means for EV Buyers [2025]

Tesla Paywalls Lane Centering: The EV Industry's Biggest Shift

Tesla just made a move that fundamentally changes what you get when you buy a new Model 3 or Model Y. The company removed lane centering—a feature that's been standard equipment on these vehicles for years—and put it behind a paywall. Now, if you want Autosteer (that's Tesla's name for lane centering), you need to pay $99 per month for Full Self-Driving Supervised. According to Electrek, this change is part of Tesla's broader strategy to push more features into subscription models.

This isn't some minor tweak. This is Tesla saying that a core driving assistance feature you could previously get for free is now a monthly subscription. And it's happening right now, as new inventory rolls onto dealer lots. As noted by Business Insider, this move aligns with Tesla's shift towards a subscription-based revenue model.

Let's be clear about what happened and why it matters. Tesla's CEO Elon Musk has a compensation package approved by shareholders that could be worth up to $1 trillion. One of the core metrics he needs to hit is 10 million active Full Self-Driving subscriptions. That's the north star. Everything else flows from that goal. Forbes highlights how this compensation package is driving strategic decisions at Tesla.

The lane centering paywall is the most aggressive push yet toward making FSD subscriptions something people feel they have to buy. It's clever, it's aggressive, and it's already drawing criticism from people who see it as nickel-and-diming customers on features they previously owned. InsideEVs reports that this decision has sparked significant backlash among Tesla's customer base.

But there's more complexity here than just "Tesla is being greedy." The company is making a strategic bet about the future of car ownership. They're betting that autonomous driving is worth paying for monthly, and they're willing to remove free features to make that case. Bloomberg discusses how this aligns with Tesla's long-term vision for autonomous vehicles.

Let's dig into what actually changed, what it costs, and what your real options are if you're thinking about buying a Tesla in 2025.

What Tesla Actually Changed

Here's the specific change: Tesla eliminated "Basic Autopilot." That was the entry-level driver assistance package, and it came with two features: Autosteer (lane centering) and Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC). According to Electrek, this move is part of Tesla's broader strategy to push more features into subscription models.

Now, TACC remains free. You get it on every new Model 3 and Model Y. That lets your car automatically match the speed of traffic in front of you. That's still free. But Autosteer—the feature that actually steers your car to keep it centered in its lane—moved to the paid subscription.

To be absolutely clear: this only affects new purchases. If you bought a Tesla before this change, your Autosteer isn't going anywhere. Owners who already have the feature keep it. This paywall only applies to new Model 3 and Model Y builds.

The timing is important here too. This change happened right as Tesla transitioned FSD from a one-time purchase option to subscription-only. On February 14, 2025, Tesla stopped selling FSD as a permanent add-on ($8,000 upfront cost). After that date, the only way to get FSD features is through the monthly subscription. Electrek provides further details on this transition.

That means new customers can't buy lane centering anymore—period. You can only lease it.

The Real Cost: Monthly vs. Yearly

Let's do the math, because this is where the sting hits.

If you subscribe to FSD Supervised at

Previously, if you wanted lane centering, it was included free with your car. You paid nothing after purchase. Now you're looking at roughly

But here's the thing: Musk already warned that the price won't stay at

Let's say it increases to

Compare that to what you paid for lane centering before: zero dollars.

Now, you could argue that FSD Supervised is more than just lane centering. It includes other features like auto lane changes, auto parking, and navigate on autopilot functionality. That's true. But for many drivers, lane centering was the main thing they used. The rest felt like nice-to-have add-ons.

Why Tesla Is Doing This

Follow the incentives.

Elon Musk's compensation package depends on Tesla hitting 10 million active FSD subscriptions. That's not a casual goal—that's the core performance metric tied to his nearly $1 trillion pay package. Right now, Tesla has somewhere around 1-2 million active FSD subscriptions (exact numbers aren't public). Getting to 10 million means converting millions of existing Tesla owners and new buyers who'd never voluntarily pay for lane centering. Investor's Business Daily discusses the strategic importance of this goal.

The elegant solution? Make lane centering free without FSD, then remove that option. Suddenly, everyone who wants lane centering on a new car has to subscribe.

This is textbook business strategy: remove the free alternative to drive adoption of the paid service. It's aggressive, but it works. And it's working exactly as designed. New Tesla buyers who want the convenience of lane centering now have to pay $99/month.

There's a secondary incentive here too: revenue. A customer paying

From a product perspective, Tesla also needs FSD usage data to improve the system. The more people using FSD, the more real-world driving data Tesla collects. That data trains the neural network that powers autonomous driving. So there's a genuine product development reason to want more FSD subscriptions. More users equals more data equals faster improvement.

But let's not pretend the primary driver here is anything other than the subscription revenue and Musk's compensation metric.

The Controversy

Not surprisingly, this move generated immediate backlash. Here's why:

First, there's the obvious angle: Tesla removed a feature that was previously free and is now charging for it. To customers, that feels like a bait-and-switch. You've seen Teslas marketed with lane centering for years. Suddenly, that feature costs $100/month. It feels deceptive, even if it's technically only affecting new purchases. InsideEVs highlights the customer dissatisfaction resulting from this change.

Second, lane centering isn't some futuristic autonomous driving technology anymore. It's a commodity feature. Every major automaker offers it, usually for free or as a one-time add-on purchase. Hyundai has lane centering. Ford has lane centering. Chevy has lane centering. None of them charge monthly for it. So Tesla is out of step with the industry, and new buyers know it.

Third, there's the trust issue. If Tesla can remove a free feature today and put it behind a paywall, what's to stop them from doing it again? Sentry Mode (camera surveillance for parking)? The premium stereo? Over-the-air updates? Once you've seen a company do this once, you start questioning what else might get paywalled next.

Fourth, there's the price trajectory concern. Musk explicitly said the price will go up. New buyers are signing up for a subscription they know will cost more in the future. That's not a great selling point.

Lastly, there's an environmental and equity angle: This makes Tesla less accessible to people who want basic safety features but can't afford monthly subscriptions. Autopilot adoption is higher among affluent drivers already. This paywall pushes adoption even more toward the wealthy.

The company would say, rightfully, that this allows them to develop better autonomous driving systems faster. And there's truth to that. But the framing matters, and the framing here is "Tesla wants more subscription revenue."

How This Compares to the Industry

Let's put Tesla's move in context. How do other automakers handle driver assistance features?

General Motors offers Super Cruise on select Cadillac and Chevy models. It's a paid feature, but you can buy it outright for around

BMW offers some driver assistance features through a subscription model, but less aggressively than Tesla. Lane keeping assist on a BMW might be a one-time purchase or standard equipment, depending on the model.

Ford's Blue Cruise is similar to GM's approach: you can buy it outright or subscribe, giving you options.

Volkswagen doesn't charge a monthly fee for lane centering on most models. It's standard or a one-time purchase.

So Tesla is the most aggressive in the industry right now about subscription-based driver assistance. They're not the only company using subscriptions, but they're the only one moving previously-free features behind paywalls at the rate Tesla is.

This is a bet on Tesla's brand loyalty and customers' willingness to pay recurring fees. It could work. Or it could create friction at the exact moment when EV competition is heating up.

The FSD Transition: One-Time Purchase Becomes Subscription-Only

Underlying all of this is a bigger transition happening in February 2025. Tesla is turning off the ability to buy Full Self-Driving as a permanent add-on.

Previously, you could buy a Tesla and, at any point, pay $8,000 to unlock FSD permanently. You paid once, and FSD was yours forever (subject to software updates and improvements, but the access was permanent).

After February 14, that option goes away. Full Self-Driving becomes subscription-only at $99/month. Electrek provides further details on this transition.

This matters because it closes off an escape hatch. Previously, if you really wanted autonomous driving features, you could save up $8,000 and buy it outright. That was expensive but finite. Monthly subscriptions feel infinite—they're meant to last as long as you own the car, and beyond.

By eliminating the one-time purchase option, Tesla removes the option of paying

This is a significant wealth transfer from consumers to Tesla. And it's intentional.

From Tesla's perspective, the subscription model makes sense. It provides recurring revenue, ensures people keep paying for software updates, and creates an incentive to keep customers in the Tesla ecosystem. But from a buyer's perspective, it's a fundamental shift in the ownership proposition.

What This Means for New Tesla Buyers

If you're thinking about buying a new Model 3 or Model Y in 2025, here's what you're facing:

You want lane centering (Autosteer)? That costs $99/month. There's no way around it anymore. No one-time purchase option. No basic tier without it. You either pay monthly or you don't get the feature.

You want other autonomous driving features like auto lane changes or navigate on autopilot? Same cost. All bundled into the $99/month FSD Supervised subscription.

You want to avoid the subscription entirely and use just Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (basic adaptive cruise control)? You can do that. TACC is still free. Your car will match the speed of traffic in front of you automatically. But it won't steer itself to stay centered in the lane.

For many drivers, this is a deal-breaker moment. Lane centering is the one autopilot feature that gets used constantly—on long highway drives, in traffic, on road trips. It's the "killer app" of driver assistance. And now it costs.

So new buyers are forced into a decision:

1. Pay $99/month for lane centering and other FSD features
2. Skip lane centering entirely and rely on basic cruise control
3. Buy a different brand of EV that includes lane centering for free

Option three is increasingly viable. Electric vehicles are more competitive now. You can get lane centering on a Hyundai Ioniq, a Ford Mustang Mach-E, or a Chevy Equinox EV without paying monthly fees. That's a real alternative to Tesla, especially if you're balking at the subscription cost.

The Subscription Trap: Understanding the Financial Model

Let's talk about subscription economics, because this is where things get interesting.

When a company moves a feature from free to paid subscription, they're making an assumption: customers will accept the monthly cost because the value justifies it.

For lane centering, that's a tough ask. It's a convenience feature. It's nice to have, but it's not essential. Most drivers can safely drive without it. They did for decades before lane centering existed.

But subscription models work on scale. If Tesla can get 20% of new buyers to pay $99/month, that's massive. Let's do the math:

Tesla delivered about 1.8 million vehicles in 2024. Let's assume they deliver a similar number in 2025. The Model 3 and Model Y account for roughly 60% of those deliveries. That's about 1.1 million vehicles.

If 20% of those buyers subscribe to FSD for lane centering (a conservative estimate given that lane centering was previously free), that's 220,000 new subscriptions.

220,000 subscriptions ×

Annualized, that's about $261 million in new FSD revenue from this paywall alone.

Now, that's from just new Model 3 and Model Y sales. Add existing Tesla owners upgrading to FSD, and you're easily looking at $500 million+ in additional annual revenue from this move.

To an investor, that's not "nickel and diming customers." That's strategic revenue generation.

But here's the tension: you can only do this move once (or a few times) before it erodes trust. If Tesla becomes a company known for paywalling previously-free features, they lose the brand loyalty halo that lets them charge premium prices.

Existing Owners: Your Lane Centering Is Safe (For Now)

Here's the reassuring part: if you already own a Tesla with lane centering, you're keeping it. This change doesn't apply to existing owners.

Tesla has been pretty consistent about this. When they release new paid features, they grandfather in existing owners who already had access. They didn't take away lane centering from people who bought before February 2025.

But here's the asterisk: "for now."

Tesla's terms of service allow them to modify features via over-the-air updates. Technically, they could push an update that disables lane centering for non-FSD subscribers. They probably won't, because the PR fallout would be enormous. But it's not impossible.

The safer interpretation is: if you own a Tesla with lane centering today, you'll likely keep it, but don't assume it's permanent. Things can change with a software update.

Why Lane Centering Is the Feature They Chose

You might wonder: why did Tesla choose lane centering to paywall? Why not something else?

A few reasons:

First, lane centering was already "decoupled" from Full Self-Driving. You could have lane centering without FSD before this. So Tesla could technically charge for it separately without changing the core FSD offering.

Second, lane centering is the most-used feature in Tesla's driver assistance suite. If you're going to force people into a subscription to drive FSD adoption, you want to choose the feature that hurts most when it's removed. Lane centering is exactly that.

Third, every other automaker offers lane centering for free. By paywalling it, Tesla creates a gap in the value proposition. New buyers feel the loss immediately. And that friction pushes them toward the FSD subscription.

Fourth, it's technically feasible to remove from the software. Tesla can push an update and disable Autosteer for non-subscribers. The feature is discretized in the codebase, making it easy to gate behind a paywall.

Compare that to, say, basic safety features like airbags or collision avoidance. Those are tied to regulatory compliance. Tesla can't really paywall those without legal consequences. So they chose a feature that was discretionary, valuable, and easily gated.

The Bigger Picture: Tesla's Subscription Strategy

This lane centering paywall is just one piece of Tesla's broader subscription strategy. Let's zoom out.

Tesla wants to build recurring revenue streams because they're more valuable than one-time sales. A

Right now, Tesla offers:

• Full Self-Driving Supervised: $99/month
• Enhanced Autopilot (if you already have it): some owners pay $8/month for specific features
• Premium Connectivity: $10/month for some regions
• Sentry Mode: theoretically free (uses onboard storage) but could become paid
• Heated seats and heated windshield: were briefly offered as monthly subscriptions in some markets

Each of these is relatively small individually. But collectively, they add up. A Tesla owner paying

Over seven years, that's $10,000 in subscription costs. That's a second vehicle's worth of revenue from software alone.

This is Tesla's vision for the future: hardware as a platform for ongoing software revenue. It's the Apple model applied to cars. And it's more profitable long-term than selling cars outright.

But it requires customer acceptance. And moves like the lane centering paywall test that acceptance.

The Technical Reality: Lane Centering vs. True Autonomy

There's a technical dimension to this that matters too.

Lane centering (Autosteer) and Full Self-Driving aren't the same thing, despite how Tesla markets them.

Lane centering is relatively simple: use the camera to detect lane lines, apply steering inputs to keep the car centered. It works on highways, in light traffic, on well-marked roads. It's passive—the driver is responsible for monitoring and taking over.

Full Self-Driving is more ambitious. It's supposed to handle complex scenarios: navigating city streets, interpreting traffic lights, making turns, parking, dealing with unexpected obstacles. It's still in beta and still requires driver supervision (hence "FSD Supervised").

Separating lane centering from FSD makes technical sense. They're different systems with different capabilities and different levels of maturity.

But to the customer, they feel like arbitrary bundling. "I just want my car to stay in the lane. Why do I have to buy the expensive full autonomy package?"

That's fair criticism. But it's also where Tesla's incentives become clear: they need to drive FSD adoption. Unbundling would let people buy just lane centering. Bundling forces a choice: pay for FSD or don't get lane centering.

Regulatory Horizon: What Regulators Might Do

Here's a wildcard: regulation.

Right now, there's no federal regulation in the U.S. about paywalling driver assistance features. But that could change.

Regulators in the EU have looked at subscriptions for basic safety features and expressed skepticism. The argument is: if a feature is important for safety, it shouldn't be locked behind a paywall that only wealthy drivers can afford.

Lane centering isn't strictly a safety feature. It's a convenience feature that increases safety but isn't strictly necessary. But there's a gray area here.

If enough legislators get bothered by this trend, they could require automakers to offer basic driver assistance features free or at a one-time cost, not as monthly subscriptions. It's unlikely but not impossible.

For now, though, the U.S. regulatory environment is more permissive. Tesla is testing the boundaries of what's acceptable, and so far, no one's shut them down.

Alternatives: Other EVs That Still Include Lane Centering

If the lane centering paywall bothers you, there are alternatives.

Hyundai's Ioniq lineup includes lane centering as standard on most trims. No extra cost, no subscription.

Ford's Mustang Mach-E includes Co-Pilot 360 (Ford's driver assistance suite) with lane centering on higher trims. Again, standard or one-time cost, not subscription.

Chevy's Equinox EV and Blazer EV include GM's Super Cruise on some trims, which is either purchased outright or subscribed to (and GM gives you options).

BMW's i4 and iX offer lane centering as standard or one-time add-on.

Audi's e-tron lineup includes adaptive cruise and lane centering.

Volkswagen's ID.4 and ID.5 include lane keeping assist.

If you're primarily concerned about lane centering functionality and don't want to pay monthly for it, these are legitimate alternatives. The EV market is competitive enough now that you don't have to buy Tesla if you don't like their subscription model.

The Future: When Will FSD Prices Increase?

Musk said FSD prices will increase as capabilities improve. That's inevitable. The question is: when?

Looking at Tesla's pattern: they've held $99/month fairly steady since introducing FSD Supervised in late 2023. But as FSD capabilities improve—if they genuinely do—expect increases.

A reasonable guess: when Tesla announces a major FSD capability improvement (like expanded city driving or hands-free highways), prices go up. Maybe to $120-150/month.

Another trigger point: if Tesla hits milestones on the 10 million subscription goal, they might increase prices to optimize revenue per customer.

Over the next three to five years, expect FSD Supervised to creep toward $150-200/month. Not all at once, but gradually.

That's important context if you're considering a new Tesla. You're not locking in $99/month. You're locking into a subscription that will likely increase.

Is FSD Worth $99/Month Right Now?

That's the real question new buyers are asking.

For lane centering alone? Probably not, unless you drive a ton of highway miles. The cost ($1,200/year) exceeds the actual time savings for most drivers.

For FSD features like auto lane changes and navigate on autopilot? Maybe. These features do save time on certain drives.

For the future promise of true autonomous driving? That's speculation. FSD is still in beta. We don't know when (or if) it'll reach true Level 4 autonomy. Paying now for capabilities that might not materialize is a bet.

My take: if you drive a lot of highway miles (20,000+ per year) and you value the convenience of lane centering, the monthly cost might be worth it. If you mostly drive locally or don't care about lane centering, it's hard to justify.

The real issue is that you no longer have a choice. If you want lane centering, you have to pay. There's no free tier, no one-time purchase. Tesla removed your options.

What's Next: The Likely Evolution

Looking forward, expect this pattern to continue:

1. More features move behind paywalls as Tesla optimizes for recurring revenue
2. Prices gradually increase as FSD capabilities expand (and as competition responds)
3. Existing owners are likely grandfathered in, but new features will be subscription-only
4. The subscription ecosystem gets richer with more bundled services
5. Regulatory questions about subscription-based safety features get louder
6. Competition responds by offering better value propositions on competing EVs

Tesla is essentially betting that their technology leadership and brand loyalty will allow them to charge subscriptions that competitors can't. That might be true—but it's a long game, and it only works if customers perceive ongoing value.

The Bigger Conversation: Who Owns Your Car's Features?

Underlying all of this is a philosophical question that goes beyond Tesla: do you own your car's features, or do you lease them?

Historically, when you bought a car, you bought the features that came with it. If your car had lane centering, it was yours. If it had heated seats, those were yours.

The subscription model changes that. Now, you rent access to features. You don't own them. Tesla can modify them, disable them, or charge for them.

This matters because it changes the ownership experience. It's the difference between owning something and renting something.

Right-to-repair advocates and open-source advocates are already concerned about this trend. As cars become software platforms, the question of who controls the software becomes crucial.

Tesla's approach—controlling software, gating features behind subscriptions, regularly updating terms—is just the beginning. This will be a defining issue for the car industry over the next decade.

Final Thoughts: The Real Cost of Going Electric

Here's what new Tesla buyers are realizing: the cost of going electric isn't just the sticker price anymore. It includes ongoing software subscriptions.

When you buy a

But that's the new cost of Tesla ownership. And as long as people keep buying, Tesla will keep pushing subscriptions.

The question for consumers is: is the Tesla experience worth the premium? Or is there a Hyundai, Ford, or Chevy EV that gives you 90% of the experience for 70% of the cost?

For Tesla loyalists and those who genuinely value FSD capabilities, the answer is clearly yes. For everyone else, it's a harder sell.

The lane centering paywall is the moment that question becomes unavoidable for new buyers. And that's when the real market dynamics will show whether Tesla's brand loyalty can overcome subscriber resistance.