Open Letter Urges Elon Musk to Make Tesla's Full Self-Driving Free to Save Lives

In 2025, an estimated 36,640 traffic fatalities were reported in the US.

Earlier this year, April 8, 2026, Elon Musk claimed that Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” is so much safer than human drivers that it could save 90% of the roughly one million lives lost in car crashes globally.

Elon, you can’t have it both ways if your safety claim is true! FSD is not just a financial gold mine for you; you must find a way to get as many of your customers using it as possible! You can’t go on charging $99/month for this life-saving technology.

In the interest of full disclosure, it would save me $1188/year if Tesla stopped charging the $99/month fee for FSD.

I own a base 2026 Tesla Model Y and have been using Full Self Driving (FSD) V14 for 4 months. FSD is so good that three is no doubt in my mind that it would save thousands of lives if all the drivers of Tesla cars (those built since mid-2023 with Hardware 4) were using it. FSD drives my car automatically like a professional driver under almost all situations. Yesterday, I was driving through the little town of Three Lakes, Wisconsin, when an emergency vehicle with lights flashing approached me head on. FSD pulled me over to the curb and parked my car until the emergency vehicle had passed. Then it resumed my trip all 100% automatically. Just one more example of the incredible functionality of FSD.

In 1959, Nils Bohlin patented his three-point seatbelt design. Bohlin felt morally compelled to offer his invention, which revolutionized safety, to all automobile manufacturers without cost. It soon became standard in all vehicles, starting with the 1959 Volvo.

If you believe Elon Musk’s statement that Tesla’s FSD is so much safer than human drivers that it could save many thousands of lives, then Tesla must find a way to get it into more vehicles and used by as many drivers as possible.

Tesla may have already spent billions of dollars developing the hardware and software to implement FSD and continues to spend millions of dollars to continue its development. This has been orders of magnitude more expensive than Volvo’s development of the three-point seatbelt. However, that does not negate the moral imperative to get FSD used by as many drivers as possible. Tesla must absolutely find a way to make this happen. Tesla’s uptake for FSD is only 15%. Therefore, even 85% of Tesla drivers can’t access this lifesaving technology. The downside of ending the $99/month charge for FSD access would be the end of an $800 million annual income stream. But how can Tesla prioritize money over human lives?

If Tesla must make more money to continue the development of FSD, the company could add a required, say, $500 safety fee to the purchase price of each new vehicle, which would make up for the income lost by no longer charging $99/month for FSD. However, to get all the current owners with vehicles with HW4 using it, Tesla needs to stop charging them $99/month.

You also need to change the software — the default must be running Full Self Driving, unlike currently, where you need to push the Start Self Driving button on the screen or push the right-hand scroll button to activate it. That button and scroll wheel could still be used to turn off FSD if a driver doesn’t want it.

It’s not enough just to activate FSD in every Tesla since 2023 and make FSD the default driving mode. My daughter bought a Tesla Model X in 2017, and some good friends bought a Model S at about the same time. Both paid the extra ~$6,000 for permanent subscriptions to Full Self Driving. However, neither has regularly used Full Self Driving. My friend said he enjoys driving so he does not activate FSD except occasionally on long trips. Similarly, my daughter would rarely activate it. Tesla needs to have a promotion program to motivate as many drivers to use it as possible. Tesla tracks the frequency of FSD use. Tesla could offer significant discounts on insurance for drivers who use FSD over, say, 90% of the time. Tesla does this already to a limited degree, but Ara, the Grok Bot in my car, informed me that the discount for FSD use is minimal. Tesla needs to make the incentive great enough to achieve a very high use rate for all of its drivers.

I had a long discussion with Ara about this subject. Ara also told me that there is an insurance company called Lemonade offering discounts for FSD use. A phone call to Lemonade revealed that they are offering a 50% discount off their mileage fee for the miles that drivers are using FSD. Unfortunately, Lemonade only offers insurance in Arizona, Oregon, Indiana, Colorado, Tennessee, and Missouri. That doesn’t include Wisconsin and Utah, where my wife and I have our residences. Ara also directed me to the control screen of my Tesla to Controls/FSD, where my FSD frequency use is reported. The frequency of FSD use for my wife and me in our Model Y is 95%. Therefore, we would qualify for any discount scenario.

I believe that we have reached the point where Tesla is morally required to make all of its new cars come with FSD as standard equipment. I think Tesla is also morally required to activate FSD on all Teslas that have the hardware capable of running the latest version of the software.

At what point will Tesla be morally obligated to offer FSD for free to any manufacturer willing to install the necessary hardware to run the FSD system? Will it be obligated to follow Nils Bohlin’s example and what he did with his patented 3-point seatbelt design in 1959? Tesla’s proprietary Superchargers were a huge step forward that made driving an EV cross-country practical in the US for the first time. Not many months ago, Tesla made its Superchargers available to all other manufacturers for the first time. Tesla Superchargers are now called North American Charging Standard (NACS) chargers, and they have truly become the North American standard for chargers. Are we not far from the time when FSD will be the universally adopted automatic driving standard in the US? Once again, the situation is not as simple as it was for seatbelts. Some other manufactures think that Tesla’s all-camera system will never be as good as systems also employing lidar and radar. This will certainly be true for very bad weather. However, Tesla’s system is much more economical to deploy and may be good enough. After all, human drivers pull off the road in extremely bad weather.

If you find any of my articles helpful to you, please use my referral link when buying a new Tesla: https://ts.la/arthur73734 (Be sure to use it when you make your order). Tesla keeps changing the program, but here’s the latest: If you are buying a new Tesla Model 3 or Y and use my link, you will get two months of free Full Self Driving (a ~$200 value) on top of the one month that comes free with every new Model Y right now. This will get you a total of 3 months free Full Self Driving. It will be $99/month after that. For a Cybertruck, you will get $1000 off your purchase price. At this moment, Tesla is offering a year of free Supercharging with the purchase of a new Model 3 Premium or Performance.