So, when you buy a Tesla, do you actually own the car? Is there any legal precedence if they brick your car if they don't like what you're doing to/with it? Or do you sign this away by agreeing to Tesla's EULA?
Tesla historically doesn't want bad press due to accidents caused by "bad physical changes", and so carefully control it. To get a Tesla back up and running once it's been "salvaged" has historically required a full inspection by a Tesla approved shop.
It's not piracy, but Tesla can (hypothetically) decide to prevent your car from turning on if they find out what you're doing.
They have calculated that enough customers will upgrade to pay for the hardware installed in the customer appliances that don't.
What's wrong with that? You don't have to wait for the hardware if you buy the upgrade.
If I had purchased such a product it would leave a sour taste in my mouth. The next time I needed such a piece of equipment I would try to find an alternative source.
Here's an analogy. If I'd purchased a box lunch of a juice box, sandwich and chips, but surprisingly they also included a cookie that is in a special package which will only unlock if I pay another $1 I would be upset. Of course, I could just throw the cookie away, package and all. I may not want the cookie anyway. But that's so wasteful! The vendor can afford to include the cookie at the price I already paid, but is solely using that cookie as a way to extract more money from me. It's wasteful.
It does seem like a weird system.
The alternative that's been around for centuries is called "having a sale".
Say, you make 1000 units of something. Each unit costs X to make. You need to make Y profit per unit to sustain your business.
The bad news is, not everyone wants to pay X+Y. The good news: some are willing to pay more. The supply-demand curve thing.
So what you can do is: sell 500 units at X+2Y. Then have limited-time sales throughout <time period> at X+0.1Y.
This way, you never lose money on a sale, and you make the money you wanted to make. The customers that want your product here and now* pay for that premium. The customers that need your product will pay up as well, as sales aren't a guaranteed thing. And the rest will wait.
With smart hardware, someone had a genius idea: have the same breakdown in prices, but also cripple the products you sell at a lower price. Make your money faster by selling at both price points simultaneously.
Nothing* wrong with trying to do that (from the seller's side).
Nothing wrong with being disgusted with the wasteful practice it and calling it out (from the customer's side).
* aside from the waste aspect, repair aspect, customer hostility, artificially high margins probably being result of a monopoly/lock-in/supplier scarcity, and a plethora of other things.
So if you don't buy the option it's not destroyed forever, but can be utilized by future users once you move on. This allows them to provide customers with instant access to extra value by charging them enough to support putting a sealed hand truck on every U-Haul, or extra terabytes in every account.
You could make the same argument about houses - imagine how much cheaper it would be if every house was built out of prefabricates, but you just had to pay extra to get the additional rooms! What arrives from the house factory has 2 bathrooms, but one is sealed shut unless you pay the fee! But that's all fine, as long as the customer can save some money?
We can already see what happens with this approach taken to the extreme - look at BMW and CarPlay. Instead of selling it as an add-on from factory for say $300, you can pay yearly to have it - about $50. And BMW says "this is great, it's saving the customers money! Average car owner has the car for 3-4 years, so they will pay less in the yearly subscription than they would have done in a one-off fee! Isn't that great for everyone?". That's nuts. Absolutely positively nuts. To extend that to heated seats - I can easily imagine some company making those things available as a pay-pass, where you pay say $0.99 to have the seats available for a day. Again, someone will say "that's fantastic! It's cheaper than paying for those seats as an option from factory, if you don't need them you don't actually pay anything!". It's absolute madness and we're encouraging this.
After working with Toyota in their multimedia and head unit design facility, I can see why car companies would switch from a set price of $300 to a yearly fee. It used to be that you just included a FM radio and a CD player and the driver was good to go. Now, these head units need updates every month. These updates mostly include compatibility with the latest IOS/Android, latest phone hardware, newer versions of Pandora/Spotify/iHeartRadio because people wanted to "thumbs up" their songs, newer versions of the HU OS because these new music app versions broke the old OS, newer maps and less embarrassingly-bad voice recognition. Behind these map updates, there's some tester with an H1B Visa getting paid a salary to drive around in a Sienna to take photos of discrepancies between the map and the actual road. Once you see this, it's easy to understand the switch to an annual fee. However, the largest cost comes from trying to connect to the latest phones to use their 3G/4G.
If Tesla wasn't hemorrhaging out money, I'd also wish Tesla had a cheaper car. But Tesla unsustainably lost $702 million last quarter and they need to make enough of a profit to pay back all of their debt and invest in building our future; otherwise they'll go bankrupt. The list of successful car company startups is short. As of 2016, the number of American car companies that haven't gone bankrupt is a grand total of two: Ford and Tesla. Starting a car company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared. Tesla's end goal is to make an affordable sports car, just as the Ford Model T was an affordable car for the masses that brought Ford from 9% market share to 61% market share. They just can't bring the costs down yet while they are hemorrhaging so much money.
Further reading: 1) https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j... 2) https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux
It's annoying if your hardware has features that you can't access, but it's more annoying if you don't have hardware at all because you can't afford the entry-level model. Disabling features allows a manufacturer to offer a broad range of products at a broad range of prices without sacrificing economies of scale, especially when there are large NRE costs to recoup.
Unless you're talking about Intel's "upgradeable" processors [1] which you could pay more to unlock performance (but that was unlocking more L1 cache, not cores AFAIK)
[1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/83896-intel-offering-c...
If they'd run out of the higher-end binned parts, they have sold out. But if they run out of the lower-end binned parts, they just relabel the higher-end parts and keep selling both lines.
Yield also isn't constant, so odds are the number of parts binned higher goes up over time as well.
IMHO this falls into two buckets for Tesla that both align with the vision:
a) You pay a one time software cost then benefit from cloud updates for the lifetime of the car. Those aren't free for Tesla to do, on any level. Would it be nice if you could opt out? Maybe but this isn't about _you_. It's about driving a technological change which you may benefit from. Buying a specially built car without those would likely be _more_ expensive than just offering one with the features switched off. So if it pleases you to pay 10k USD (made up number) _more_ for a car that you can never upgrade just so you aren't offended by software you can't use then....sure?
b) In terms of their mission in benefits them to operate in this way. It's a quiet spur to other manufactures who aside from Nissan don't seem to quite get. Tesla has shown that you can build a $35K USD car that competes with everything and cast a lower cost of ownership over 5 years than a Prius. I remember early discussions coming out of VW that convinced them to go all in. Quite simply that said, wait - if the base Model 3 has a theoretical cost of 35k and that some non-trivial percentage of that is autonomous hardware, redundant and constant cellular communication, an over top the drive train to handle a 3.5 second 0-60 launch, and a bunch of tech goodies then we can make a 20k car that's mechanically just as good with all the bells and whistles of a modern sedan...just wont't be a futuristic space car.