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Comment by not1ofU | Hacker News Reader

If you buy a car, and a few months later, the person you bought it from, came to your abode and changed out one wheel for a totally different wheel, would it bother you?

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Tesla already has done this by removing supercharging[1], autopilot[2] and ethernet [3] on its cars without notifying the owner prior to disabling these features.

1 - https://electrek.co/2021/08/12/tesla-starts-giving-back-supe... 2 - https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-aut... 3 - https://www.tweaktown.com/news/36851/tesla-model-s-owner-fid...

That doesn't make it right. In fact reading this sours me even more on buying a Tesla.

Not if they said the second I bought it "You can have it for $45k and we don't come to your house and swap the wheels, or $43k and we do come to your house in 3 months and swap the wheels", or "Sure you can buy it, but you need to sign on the dotted line that you understand that the wheels are still ours and we'll swap them in a while for some other wheels, also ours and there is no way you can buy or use your own wheels."

Is it an acceptable practice to do this in fine print? I don't know. It's a bit dodgy I'll admit. But I have personally completely given up on the idea that just because I hand over money and receive a physical item I somehow "own" it in the sense that I can do what I want with it, at least if it contains software.

If the sales contract we agreed on allows that kind of stuff, I have no one else to blame.

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