Not sure what to make of this. New buyers are getting less than current owners now, but expected to get much more later?
I can't think of a precedent for this as a marketing approach in modern consumer products.
Features including performance related features have been pushed via software updates for years.
Anything from navigation to cruise control to sport packages have been deployed either OTA or via a manual update.
Tesla is just pushing it to a new limit (not necessarily a good thing) and is actually advertising every change and feature update.
Can you give any examples of other feature improvements in cars that have been pushed via OTA?
Do you know if MobileEye dropped them, or they chose to go with something else? How do you know?
E.g. the one here: http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/09/tesla-dropped-by-mobiley...
Apple iOS ;) the iPhone 7 had (don't know if it has now) some camera features (autofocus and raw related) disabled that were present on the 6/6s because of software limitations.
This isn't that uncommon many times you can have a new product which comes with some features disabled/not working because the software did not catch up to the hardware yet for what ever reason.
There were also another thing or 2 that came in 10.3 iirc.
This is analogous to the Tesla example, new hardware no software.
The fact that the 7+ has a different portrait mode doesn't matter, the app had none, and in this case the new Tesla comes with new hardware that provides a different and arguably better "autopilot" but the software would trail the release of the hardware.
Autopilot 1.0 was the precedent.
They announced that at the 'D' event that all cars shipping from then on would have AP hardware in.
The capabilities were progressively rolled out depending on the tech package you purchased over the next 12 months.
This is a clear "temporary" downgrade of capabilities in exchange for a later payoff.