The Self-Driving app is where a free trial gets cancelled

Tesla's spring 2026 software introduced a dedicated Self-Driving app on AI4 (HW4) cars, alongside the Grok voice assistant, Pet Mode and a 24-hour dashcam buffer. The referral consequence is administrative rather than glamorous: it is where a referral FSD trial is managed and, if you want, stopped.

Why a cancellation path is referral news at all

Because since 14 February 2026 there is no FSD purchase in North America — only a $99 monthly subscription. That makes the referral benefit a free trial of a recurring bill. Doing nothing at the end of month three does not return you to your starting position; it starts the bill. The arithmetic of the benefit is in the $297 calculation; this dispatch is about the part that protects it.

The two-step version

1. On the day the trial appears, write the end date down — in whatever calendar you actually read. Three months is long enough to forget and short enough that one forgotten month is a third of the benefit's value.
2. Manage it where the state lives. On AI4 cars that is the Self-Driving app; older interfaces surface the same subscription controls under the car's software screens or in the Tesla app. Either way it is inside Tesla's own software, not a support call.

What the app changed in practice

Before it, FSD state was spread across screens: a subscription toggle in one place, feature settings in another, trial status somewhere else. Consolidating them means the question "is this still free, and when does that stop" has one place to be answered. For a trial holder that is the difference between a diary reminder and a search.

Cancelling is not a snub to the referrer

Worth saying, because people hesitate. The referrer's side of the transaction completed when the order did: their credits are granted on the Grant Date and run their own 12-month clock regardless of what the buyer does with the trial. Cancelling at the end of month three costs them nothing.

The judgement call at month three

Three questions, none about the referral. Did you actually use it, or mostly drive as before? Do your routine routes suit it? And would you rather pay seasonally — a road-trip month on, the rest off — than continuously? A subscription can be stopped and restarted, which makes "not now" a cheaper answer than it used to be when FSD was a purchase.

The one failure mode the app cannot fix

It manages a trial you already have. It cannot attach one, and that is the failure that actually costs buyers the benefit: a referral cannot be applied after the order is placed, so an order submitted without a link produces no trial for the Self-Driving app to manage. The app protects the back end of the benefit; the order summary protects the front end. Both screens matter, and only one of them has a deadline you can miss without noticing.

One European footnote

European FSD trials now carry an end-of-trip driver-attentiveness grade, introduced in Amsterdam in August 2026. It is not a North American change, but it is a fair description of what a supervised system asks during a trial: it is a supervised-driving period, not a hands-off one.