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On the one hand, this causes a deeply ingrained negative reaction in me.

On the other, people have been paying hundreds (thousands?) of dollars for digital tunes to reflash their ECU to add more horsepower/torque for years now.

That is a one time fee as opposed to a subscription, so maybe therein lies the problem.

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As long as the car manufacturer isn't selling the tunes, that doesn't really offend my sensibilities.

Arbitrarily restricting capability just so the manufacturer can make more money is the problem.

This is what Volvo does with their Polestar upgrades already, with the only difference that it's a one time fee.

think there is an underlying fundamental difference here, the factory tuning of an ECU is meant to work okay for most conditions, that be the car and weather or whatever, that process is adding on something, fine tuning combustion but for an electric car, it's totally subtractive, the car would have that acceleration if they didnt arbitraraly block it

Ignoring the cost for a second, I don't want max possible acceleration all the time. Modern gas pedals are already sensitive enough, no reason to need an even lighter touch in stop+go traffic.

You fix this by putting a setting in the infotainment system that says "Eco mode". My mom's Rav4 has this functionality, it's not exotic.

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