Episode 546: Tesla's FSD Is Going Subscription-Only
Ride the Lightning: Tesla and EV Podcast
Ryan McCaffrey
4.7 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2026
⏱️ 88 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tesla will soon remove the option to purchase FSD outright. Plus: Model Y's design changes from last week – plus a couple more – come to the United States even sooner than expected this week, a California Supercharger station will soon expand to a record number of posts, Polestar shows some impressive growth, and more!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On this week's episode of Ride the Lightning, the Tesla and EV podcast, Tesla will soon remove the option to purchase FSD outright. |
| 0:09.0 | Plus, model-wise design changes from last week, plus a couple more, come to the United States even sooner than expected. |
| 0:17.0 | A California supercharger station will soon expand to a record number of posts. Pole Star shows some impressive growth and friends, I'm Ryan McCaffrey, joining you for episode 546 of your weekly Tesla and EV podcast. |
| 0:53.6 | I call it Ride the Lightning. It's for January 18th, |
| 0:57.1 | 2026 to my left. Daisy the Boxer just below me at my feet chewing on a bone is Lily the Silly |
| 1:03.6 | Labrador. Hope you're all having a great week wherever and whenever you are listening to this. |
| 1:09.0 | And I want to start this week's podcast by once again acknowledging there's one more |
| 1:14.7 | little fun development in my ongoing quest to see Bigfoot, aka the long range rear wheel |
| 1:22.9 | drive cyber truck that I've been somewhat half jokinglyokingly questioning the real-life existence of. |
| 1:30.5 | Thank you to Vitor in Florida, a listener who sent me photographic evidence, picture-proof, |
| 1:37.4 | of that mythical long-range rear-wheel drive cyber truck. |
| 1:42.4 | I will say so, yes, I now now all jokes aside, 100% believe that they |
| 1:48.7 | did get delivered to actual customers. But at the same point, I will say as a final point on this, |
| 1:55.4 | I do genuinely wonder how many of them are actually out there. You know, they weren't on sale for very long. |
| 2:02.7 | The cyber truck just hasn't been selling super well relative to the other, |
| 2:06.8 | well, at least relative to its expectations and relative to the three and the Y. |
| 2:11.2 | And like I said, I haven't seen any here in my very Tesla-tastic San Francisco Bay Area at all. So I think we can |
| 2:19.7 | probably safely add the long-range rear-wheel drive cyber truck to the list of Tesla |
| 2:26.8 | unicorns, which I've done a lightning round mini episode on for Patreon. Basically, I refer to very rare configurations of Tesla's as Tesla unicorns. |
| 2:39.4 | And I think we can add all of the long-range rear-wheel drive cyber trucks to that list. |
| 2:45.5 | Next time I see Franz, I'll have to ask him how many of those variant exist. |
| 2:51.4 | I'm not sure he'll tell me on that one, but I am curious for sure. |
... |
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