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It's most likely a hardware availablity issue.

They have run out of sensors, and they don't want to pause production until they have produced more.

At the same time, all other manufacturers stopped production until parts were available again. Which is the reasonable thing to do. Only they got ridiculed for how bad the supply chains are, because Tesla continued shipping, that Tesla shipped what is normally considered half finished cars was blissfully ignored.

Seems like the "upstanding" thing to do would be to ship without (and credit for the omission) and offer free retrofit once available.

That would be an extreme logistical and costly nightmare.

Tesla doesn't operate the dealership model, which all tend to double up as a service station. So it's far more difficult for customers to get to the telsa service stations. Since there's less, that also means they'd be insane waits when the product comes back in.

So they decided to ship cars with paid for features missing and now try to cover that with, IMHO misleading, marketing announcements.

My understanding is that Ford has done this for non-critical features as of late.

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