Tesla has quietly killed off Autopilot, the driver-assistance package that helped define the company’s image and fueled years of marketing — and controversy. In its place, Tesla is steering customers toward its more ambitious and more expensive software suite, Full Self-Driving (Supervised), as it tries to turn automated driving into a core profit engine.

The move comes at a moment of unusual legal and regulatory pressure for the automaker. In its largest U.S. market, California, Tesla is facing a 30-day suspension of its manufacturing and dealer licenses after a judge found that the company misled consumers for years about the capabilities of both Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, often referred to as FSD. The California Department of Motor Vehicles, which brought the case, has stayed the suspension for 60 days to give Tesla time to comply with the ruling, including dropping the Autopilot name from its marketing and materials.

Autopilot, introduced in the mid-2010s and made standard on all Tesla vehicles in 2019, was never a self-driving system, despite its branding. It combined two advanced driver-assistance features: Traffic Aware Cruise Control, which maintains a set speed and distance from the car ahead, and Autosteer, which keeps the vehicle centered in its lane and can guide it through curves. Together, they offered a taste of automation but still required constant driver supervision and hands on the wheel.

Now, Tesla’s online configurator shows that new vehicles no longer ship with Autopilot as a bundled feature. Instead, they come only with basic Traffic Aware Cruise Control as standard equipment. Autosteer and the broader Autopilot package have effectively disappeared from the ordering page. Tesla has not clearly stated whether existing owners will lose access to Autopilot or whether the change applies only to new vehicles going forward, leaving current customers in a gray area.

The strategic direction, however, is clear: Tesla wants drivers to upgrade to Full Self-Driving (Supervised), the company’s most advanced software package. FSD adds automated lane changes, navigation on highways and city streets, and the ability for the car to attempt turns, handle intersections, and respond to traffic controls. Despite the name, Tesla still instructs drivers to remain attentive and ready to take over at any time.

In a parallel shift, Tesla is also changing how it charges for FSD. The company has said it will phase out the one-time purchase option, historically priced at around $8,000, and move entirely to a subscription model. Customers will be able to access FSD for a monthly fee, currently advertised at $99, with Tesla CEO Elon Musk signaling that the subscription price will rise as the software’s capabilities expand. That transition reflects a broader push in the auto industry to turn software into a recurring revenue stream rather than a one-off sale.

Musk has repeatedly claimed that Tesla is on the cusp of a breakthrough in autonomy. He has said that newer Tesla vehicles will eventually be capable of “unsupervised” driving, suggesting that owners will be able to “be on your phone or sleeping for the entire ride.” He has also touted recent FSD updates as good enough to allow drivers to look at their phones, even though texting while driving is illegal in most U.S. states and regulators have warned that such behavior is unsafe with current systems.

At the same time, Tesla is beginning to test the outer limits of its technology in controlled deployments. In Austin, Texas, the company has rolled out the first robotaxi-configured Model Y vehicles that operate without a human safety driver inside. These cars run a more advanced version of Tesla’s driving software and are shadowed by other Tesla vehicles for external supervision. The pilot is small and heavily monitored, but it signals Musk’s determination to prove that Tesla’s software can underpin a commercial robotaxi service.

Despite years of hype, adoption of FSD has lagged far behind Musk’s ambitions. Tesla launched the beta version of FSD in 2020, gradually expanding access to more owners. Yet only a minority of customers have been willing to pay thousands of dollars for a system that still requires constant oversight and has been criticized for inconsistent performance. Company executives have acknowledged that uptake is modest relative to the size of Tesla’s fleet.

That matters because FSD is central to Tesla’s long-term financial story and to Musk’s own compensation. The company has framed software as a high-margin product that could dramatically increase profits if millions of owners subscribe. Internal targets envision tens of millions of active FSD subscriptions in the coming decade. Hitting those numbers is one of the key product milestones tied to Musk’s massive new pay package, which could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars if fully realized.

Autopilot’s demise also closes a turbulent chapter in Tesla’s history. Over more than a decade, the company struggled to accurately describe what the system could and could not do. Marketing materials, public statements, and even the Autopilot and FSD names themselves often suggested a level of autonomy that the technology did not actually deliver. Safety advocates and regulators argued that this mismatch encouraged some drivers to overtrust the system, treating it as self-driving when it was not.

Those concerns were not theoretical. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has linked Autopilot to hundreds of crashes and at least 13 fatalities in the United States. Investigations found repeated instances of Teslas on Autopilot plowing into stationary emergency vehicles, failing to respond appropriately to road hazards, or allowing drivers to disengage from the driving task for extended periods. Tesla has pushed software updates and added more frequent driver-attention checks, but critics say the company’s branding and messaging have remained dangerously optimistic.

The California DMV’s deceptive-marketing case crystallized those long-running tensions. By forcing Tesla to abandon the Autopilot name and rein in its claims, regulators are effectively demanding that the company align its language with the actual capabilities of its systems. Tesla’s decision to discontinue Autopilot altogether, rather than simply rebrand it, suggests that the company sees more value in pushing customers toward FSD than in preserving a legacy feature that has become a legal liability.

For Tesla owners and prospective buyers, the shift raises practical questions. Without Autosteer as a standard feature, new Teslas will feel less automated out of the box than they have in recent years. Drivers who want lane-centering and more advanced assistance will be nudged toward paying for FSD, either through a subscription or whatever pricing model Tesla ultimately settles on. That could increase the cost of ownership for those who have grown accustomed to Autopilot’s capabilities being included.

More broadly, Tesla’s pivot underscores a larger debate about how quickly and safely the auto industry should move toward automation. On one side, Musk and his supporters argue that rapid deployment of increasingly capable software will save lives by reducing human error, which is responsible for the vast majority of crashes. On the other, regulators and safety experts warn that overstating what current systems can do risks creating a dangerous gap between driver expectations and technological reality.

By retiring Autopilot and doubling down on Full Self-Driving, Tesla is betting that customers will follow it into a future where software, not hardware, defines the value of a car. Whether regulators, safety investigators, and the driving public are ready to make that leap remains an open question.