It's not trivial to get an always-connected car working(as we've seen from other mfgrs). I think where you'll see Tesla succeed is using the aggregated data across it's whole fleet to make smart engineering/product decisions moving forward.
We've already seen this when the bumped up the spec on the 85D from 5.2s to 3.9s 0-60 based on real-world motor usage.
That's not how patents work.
A patent includes the description of how the invention works right in the application. Consequently, if you live in a jurisdiction where you don't fear prosecution, you can immediately clone the idea. The only way Tesla could have kept their ideas "secret" would have been to not patent them at all!
Tesla's patent pledge was just a public statement that, under certain conditions, they wouldn't sue.
That's exactly why SpaceX doesn't patent their technologies; the actors who would copy them are orgs they can't sue (nation states).
Hmm, I actually find that very unsettling in the context of this article and the recent VW debacle. Detecting fraud and recall worthy software failures was already a scary prospect. But a random companies' random engineers tuning a few thousand cars here or there to see what happens in real time.. I feel like we are about to enter a horrible new world where computer forensics meets regular forensics.