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Researchers jailbreak a Tesla to get free in-car feature upgrades
(techcrunch.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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I'm amazed that it's legal for a car company to sell you something, and then after you own it, remotely disable xyz aspects of the functionality unless you pay them more. How can that be legal? I own the car, it's MINE now, how can I not use every single thing that's in it?
It's a bit inevitable. There's a market for a range of features - i.e. some people don't want to pay extra for extra features. But it's simpler (i.e. cheaper) to produce all models with the same hardware. So, to fill the market, some features are simply disabled in software.
Oftentimes it's done because it's cheaper, though oftentimes it's actually more expensive but they calculate that money from licenses post initial sale gets them more revenue and margin in the end anyway.
Still, even if it always was cheaper for the manufacturer this way, the point here is companies should not be able to control something you physically own once you have purchased it. It's a dangerous precedent to set and things like this will creep into more and more products if we let it.
Companies have owned your hardware for decades. Apart from a few open hardware systems like x86, everything comes software or mechanically locked to the price you pay.