Tesla has officially altered how European buyers can access its highest tier of driver assistance systems. The American electric vehicle manufacturer stopped offering Full Self-Driving, often called FSD, as a permanent, one-time purchase across Europe. Moving forward, anyone who wants to use these software features on new electric cars will have to pay a monthly fee.

Previously, Tesla allowed buyers in Europe to pay an upfront cost of €7,500 or £6,800 in the United Kingdom to secure lifetime access to what the company marketed as Full Self-Driving Capability. That permanent buying option is gone. In its place, the automaker now requires a recurring monthly subscription fee of €99 or £99 to turn on the software.

Tesla Germany

Along with this shift, Tesla also eliminated the mid-tier Enhanced Autopilot package. This older option used to cost €3,800 or £3,400 as a one-time purchase. For that price, it gave drivers lifetime access to automatic lane changes, automated overtaking, highway navigation, and a smartphone-controlled summoning tool. Now, buyers can no longer purchase this specific mid-tier bundle at all.

Despite the updates to the paid packages, the most basic driver-assist features remain unchanged. Tesla includes its standard Autopilot system for free on all vehicles. This complimentary package keeps the car centered within its lane, manages steering, and controls acceleration and braking.

The €99 monthly payment is meant to unlock the more advanced FSD system, which allows the vehicle to travel from one point to another under human supervision. However, the regulatory environment in Europe creates a unique challenge for local buyers. Right now, government authorities have approved the actual use of this complete software suite in only two European nations: the Netherlands and Lithuania.

TESLA UK

Because the continent lacks uniform approval for this technology, Tesla owners in different countries face very different realities. On its website for the Netherlands, where the system is legally live, Tesla states that its electric cars can drive almost anywhere with minimal intervention. In sharp contrast, the company website for the United Kingdom has a clear warning that the system is not yet available and depends entirely on future development and government regulatory clearance.

This leaves many European buyers in a position where they must pay a monthly subscription for software that cannot legally perform its main tasks in their home countries. Tesla implemented an identical strategy in the United States, where it removed the $8,000 upfront FSD purchase option in favor of a $99 monthly fee.

From a purely financial perspective, the monthly payment system has both benefits and drawbacks for the average consumer. If a driver pays €99 every month, it takes slightly more than six years of continuous payments to reach the €7,500 that the software used to cost upfront. For owners who trade in their electric cars every few years, the subscription model could actually save them money.

TESLA Netherlands

A monthly plan adds some much-needed flexibility – owners can choose to activate the service for a single month during a long road trip and then cancel it when they return to daily city commuting. This avoids the risk of paying a massive lump sum for software that stays tied to a single vehicle chassis.

Many long-term Tesla owners paid thousands of euros years ago based on promises that their vehicles would eventually achieve full autonomy. However, company Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk confirmed during a recent financial call that older vehicles using previous-generation Hardware 3 technology will not be capable of true, unmonitored self-driving. To solve this problem, the carmaker will have to build specialized micro-factories to upgrade these older electric cars with newer hardware components.

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A United Airlines flight from Venice struck a light pole and seemingly grazed the top of a tractor trailer as it touched down in Newark on Sunday afternoon. Somehow, the truck driver suffered only minor injuries, and nobody on the plane was hurt.

There has been some confusion as to whether the plane struck the pole, and the pole alone made contact with the truck, or the plane hit both. New Jersey State Police said in a preliminary investigation, per WABC-TV New York, that both “a landing tire and the underside” of United Flight 169 did in fact make contact with the top of the truck’s trailer. Photos acquired by WNBC show damage to the plane, including a gash in its body and scuffs along a tire’s sidewall. The felled pole apparently hit a Jeep that was also traveling on the NJ Turnpike.

Amazingly, there is dashcam footage from the truck itself, which you can see in the ABC News video embedded below. While it’s certainly alarming, it doesn’t give us much insight as to what’s happening outside the vehicle. We hear the howl of a closing plane, see the driver look up and, in an instant, there’s a loud crash and the camera tumbles to the ground.

United flight hits light pole while landing

The driver was thankfully able to pull over and receive medical attention for cuts on his arm due to shattered glass. The plane held 221 passengers and 10 crew members, all of which made it off unharmed in an otherwise safe landing. The plane, a Boeing 767-400, was said to have “sustained only minor damage,” and the National Transportation Safety Board is currently gathering information to figure out precisely what happened, as is the Federal Aviation Administration.

The truck was operated by Baker’s Express, hauling baked goods for the H&S Family of Bakeries. H&S owner Chuck Paterakis initially told ABC News that “the trailer is not damaged, and the bread product was not touched,” though, given the apparent force of the collision as we can see from the footage, it’s hard to believe how the truck could’ve emerged unscathed.

United Airlines issued a statement, saying, “We will conduct a rigorous flight safety investigation into the incident and our crew has been removed from service as part of the process.”

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Swedish electric carmaker Polestar has once again delivered on its commitment to publish the full carbon footprint of every vehicle in its lineup, and says the cradle-to-gate carbon footprint of its Polestar 5 four-door GT measured in at 23.8 tonnes of CO2-equivalent.

Polestar is the first original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to publish the full carbon footprint of every vehicle in its lineup, part of the company’s efforts to provide customers with greater transparency about the climate impact of the cars that they drive.

The Polestar 5 four-door GT – soon to be released in Australia – boasts a range of up to 678 kilometres (WLTP) and, in its dual-motor variant, up to 650kW of power and acceleration from 0-100km/h of just 3.2 seconds.

But it’s the car’s manufacturing process in the spotlight here, boasting a cradle-to-grave carbon footprint of 23.8 tonnes of CO2-equivalent (tCO2e).

According to Polestar’s analysis, 60 per cent of the cradle-to-gate climate impact is due to the materials used in the vehicle’s production, which excludes the battery modules. A smidge over 50 per cent of the materials emissions comes from aluminium, with steel and iron accounting for another 17 per cent.

The lithium-ion battery modules accounted for 29 per cent of a single car’s emissions, with logistics (10 per cent) and manufacturing rounding out the list.

In Polestar’s estimation, the climate impact of the battery is relatively low due to the use of 100 per cent renewable electricity in the production of the anode and cathode active materials and in the cell production of the battery modules.

Importantly, to account for the huge impact aluminium has on the car’s emissions during production, 13 per cent of the aluminium used is recycled and 83 per cent comes from smelters powered by renewable electricity.

As a result, Polestar has been able to avoid 14 tCO2e per car compared with conventional aluminium sourcing.

Other emissions savings were made with the use of innovative materials in the car’s interior, such as natural fibre composites and recycled materials.

The full vehicle life cycle, which includes cradle-to-gate and then a further 200,000 kilometres driving plus end-of-life treatment, works out to 28.5 tCO₂e using the European electricity mix, but skyrockets to 38.6 tCO2e if manufacturing were to rely on the global electricity mix.

“You cannot reduce what you don’t measure,” said Fredrika Klarén, head of sustainability at Polestar.

“Making the carbon footprint of a car visible helps focus the industry on where emissions occur, particularly in materials and manufacturing. That transparency is essential if we want to scale the low-carbon materials, renewable energy and circular solutions needed to reduce the climate impact of cars.”

The full Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) for the Polestar 5, available in full here, is based on the 2026 model year, the car’s first model year, and has been critically reviewed by British engineering services firm Ricardo.

The Polestar 5 is currently available in Australia with a hefty price tag in excess of $185,000, and up to nearly $210,000 for the Performance – Launch edition.

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Elon Musk took to X earlier this week to announce that Tesla is now operating robotaxis in Austin, Texas, without safety monitors in the car. While we’re happy to call Musk out on a fib, it appears he was being quite literal about the whole situation. Tesla is indeed operating robotaxis in Austin without safety monitors inside those taxis, but that doesn’t mean they’re absent. Instead, they’re accompanying them from the confines of a separate chase car—or chase cars, as video from a robotaxi user demonstrates.

While Tesla’s launch of the supposedly unmonitored vehicles made big headlines this week, the presence of spotters was not widely reported. It came to our attention by way of Electrek, which reported on the story Thursday.

Recent updates to Tesla’s so-called “Full Self-Driving” suite have finally enabled users to see the sort of reliability Musk promised nearly a decade ago, as Alex Roy and his merry band of autonomy geeks demonstrated yesterday by pulling off a drive from Los Angeles to New York with zero interventions. FSD was far from flawless, and weather and human error conspired to stretch it hours longer than previous attempts, but the car completed the journey without human takeover nonetheless.

My first unsupervised @robotaxi ride here in Austin! Come along with me on this 1st experience of driving around Austin with just me in the car and in the back seat!

Congrats to the @Tesla_AI team! pic.twitter.com/YVJ19zp2qZ

— Joe Tegtmeyer (@JoeTegtmeyer) January 22, 2026

The secret sauce that enabled this transition was introduced in a recent build of FSD, which is now in revision 14.2.2.3 as of the time of publication. Now, when FSD encounters an error that would have previously resulted in an immediate hand-off to the driver, rather than shutting down entirely while awaiting manual input, the software will continuously attempt to recover on its own. It’s known as TOI (“Take Over Immediately”) Recovery, or as I’ve already taken to calling it, “Try, Try Again” mode.

The end result is fewer FSD disengagements, which is likely why Tesla’s confidence level has improved so much. Roy told us that he saw the feature trigger twice on his trip, both times resulting in successful recoveries by the software. In other words, without TOI Recovery, Musk’s promised Los Angeles to New York trip would still be a hypothetical—nine years after he promised it.

But even with TOI Recovery, there are still limits to what FSD can do without human intervention. As long as that remains true, we expect the safety monitors to remain in tow. Sounds expensive, but if anybody can afford it, it’s Tesla.

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