Tesla makes some of the most advanced and technology-rich vehicles today, but that functionality comes at a price. The automaker’s vehicles are expensive, and in order to maintain the technology over time, some buyers pay a monthly subscription to access certain services. Tesla offered a basic connectivity service for free, but that will change in the future. The automaker will offer Standard Connectivity for free for the first eight years of ownership and will charge a subscription fee thereafter.
July 20, 2022 was the deadline for free lifetime connectivity. Buyers now have eight years of service from the date of purchase and must then pay a monthly or annual subscription fee. Standard service is the lower of two connectivity levels that Tesla offers. It includes navigation, but lacks live traffic, video streaming, and other features of the Premium tier, which already costs $99 per year. Most people upgrade to the Premium features, so this won’t be a huge change for many buyers.
While many like to switch between new cars every few years, people tend to stick with cars for more than eight years. iSeeCars found that people keep cars for an average of 8.4 years, so there is a chance that owners will encounter the service outage in their long-owned Tesla. At the same time, technology is evolving rapidly, so it will be interesting to see if the average ownership time changes.
People may be tempted to switch cars for new technology and features, but car manufacturers are working to make their vehicles as sustainable as possible. Over-the-air updates (OTA) enable car companies to add new features, improve existing systems and extend the life of a technically advanced car. Whether they can add enough to keep a vehicle interesting for eight years or more remains to be seen, though Tesla is working on adding functionality such as new driving modes, pet parking modes, and even games via OTAs.