Tesla FSD ‘subscriptions’ hit 1.74M, counted the way Musk’s pay package wants

Tesla says it now has 1.74 million active “Full Self-Driving” subscriptions, up 67% from a year ago. A footnote in its Q3 2026 shareholder letter explains how it gets there: the metric follows “our 2025 CEO Performance Award” and “includes both upfront payment and monthly subscriptions.”

So owners who bought FSD outright, some of them years ago, count as subscribers. That matters because 10 million active FSD subscriptions is one of the milestones Elon Musk has to hit to earn his 2025 pay package. It also matters because hundred of thousands of those FSD “subscribers” were sold unsupervised self-driving, which Tesla has yet to deliver.

How Tesla counts FSD subscriptions

Here’s what Tesla has reported under that definition:

Quarter

Active FSD subscriptions

Q3 2025

1.04 million

Q4 2025

1.10 million

Q1 2026

1.28 million

Q2 2026

1.48 million

Q3 2026

1.74 million

Tesla stopped selling FSD as a one-time purchase on February 14, 2026. New customers can only get it as a subscription, at $99 a month in the US. But everyone who paid upfront before that, at prices that reached $15,000, stays in the count as long as the car is active. The only exclusion is free trials.

We flagged this in April when Tesla reported 1.28 million. Six months later, Tesla still doesn’t say how many of the 1.74 million actually pay every month.

The same approach shows up elsewhere in the letter. Tesla’s “cumulative deliveries” figure, now 10.2 million, also counts “any unsupervised Robotaxis placed into commercial operation,” again to match the pay package, which has a 20 million vehicle milestone.

The 75% attach rate

Tesla also says more than 75% of new deliveries in North America included FSD subscriptions in Q3, “a nearly twenty percentage point sequential increase.” It says it believes “FSD is driving demand in markets where it is available.”

That’s a big number, and Tesla doesn’t define it. The letter doesn’t say whether it counts subscriptions started at delivery with an introductory offer, or how many of those buyers are still paying after a few months. The active-subscription metric excludes free trials, but Tesla doesn’t say the same about the attach rate.

The road to 10 million

Musk’s 2025 award has 12 tranches. Each requires a market cap milestone and one operational milestone. The operational list includes 20 million vehicles delivered, 10 million active FSD subscriptions, 1 million Optimus robots, 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation, and adjusted EBITDA targets. As of June 30, Tesla considered only one of them probable: 20 million deliveries.

Tesla added 260,000 net FSD subscriptions in Q3, its best quarter yet. At that pace, it would take about eight years to reach 10 million. At the pace of the last 12 months, about 700,000 a year, it would take closer to 12. The award runs until 2035.

Electrek’s Take

Counting people who bought FSD outright isn’t wrong on its own. Those cars do have the software. The problem is calling them “subscriptions” and presenting the total as proof of momentum, when the definition was written for Musk’s pay package and not for investors trying to understand the business.

Also, you promised unsupervised self-driving to many of those “subscribers.” Hardly a win to count them now in a “supervised” service with no end in sight for the supervision.

This is now Tesla’s headline software metric. The board wrote the definition, Musk’s compensation depends on it, and the company won’t say how many people pay $99 a month. Tesla obviously knows that number.

The attach rate is the more interesting claim, if it holds up. A 75% take rate on a $99-a-month product would be a real business. So show us the retention: how many North American buyers who started a subscription in Q2 are still paying today?