Hackers manage to unlock Tesla software-locked features
electrek.co
electrek.co
Buried in the article is the claim that this will let them pull the RSA private key the car owns out for other uses -- while this is likely to remain a very niche attack vector, that's got to be really bad news for someone in vehicle security at Tesla. On the other hand, post jailbreak you could anonymize your location on Tesla's servers, which would be nice.
The one feature I miss is that there's no voice commands since that requires Tesla's servers but at the same time I also haven't been bothered enough to plug in a custom backend
So the company that goes "we don't need physical buttons since we have voice commands" also goes "you don't need those in underground parkings"?!
I've been hacking on my car and creating my own self driving models
Code is at https://github.com/d4l3k/torchdrive
They're also at https://github.com/d4l3k/fn.lc/tree/master/static%2Fdiy-self...
It says in the article: "Generally, these exploits are shared with Tesla, and it helps the automaker secure its systems."
So it's only a matter of time till Tesla patches it.
> The group of hackers claims that their “Tesla Jailbreak” is “unpatchable” and allows to run “arbitrary software on the infotainment.”
And the full quote of what you put:
> Electrek’s Take
> Generally, these exploits are shared with Tesla, and it helps the automaker secure its systems.
> In this case, the hackers said that despite the exploit, they believe Tesla’s security is better than other automakers.
Doesn't seem like the security researchers actually shared the exploit with Tesla, at least as far as I understand.
And if this research group wants to enable regular people to "jailbreak" their cars, they have to publish their full methodology anyway.
And yeah, you are correct, Tesla can close up that exploit in their newer hardware revisions.
So hackers can claim they called tesla, and tesla can ignore it and we no wiser
For the Xbox 360, the "Reset Glitch Hack" (which worked similarly) would just try over and over again until it got it right. A computer is happy to try tens or hundreds of times on your behalf.
Idk, hardware modification of the first Playstation that allowed to play ripped games became mainstream very quickly in my country (France) and you could even go to some shops that sold Playstations to get it done. It only stopped when it was made openly illegal.
“I paid for this shit, I do what I want with it” is a very powerful sentiment (and a legitimate one actually: corporation adding “Digital Right Management” system to deprive people from their property right is dystopian as hell).
So logically, it isn't modding/unlocking the console itself that's illegitimate. But it can be used for certain illegitimate actions, yes (along with legitimate ones).
And these use-cases aren't only legitimate, in France they are even legal and in exchange we pay a tax whenever we buy a media storage device (Taxe sur la copie privée).
I remember this. Chip on chip iirc. The period is stored in my memory because it was also when DVD media first broke the $1/disc barrier. It wasn't very good media at $1 per but exciting times nonetheless.
Not quite as convenient, but lack of invasive mod was the tradeoff.
If you can't afford to maintain an expensive car, you can't afford to purchase an expensive car.
Depends on how you acquire it. I can get a couple BMW's for cheap to free but I've heard too many repair stories around the campfile to blind dive into that particular rabbit hole.
I doubt any of this works anymore though
One of the ladies doing the nails says, "He no work here no more, check dry cleaner across the street." We get back in the car and I'm like, "What was that all about?". "My DirecTV card got disabled and that's where I get it reprogrammed".
We go across the street to the Dry Cleaners. There are three ladies in the lobby watching TV, and a guy behind the counter. He asks the man, "Is Ken here?" The man says, "I'll check" as he walks into the back. Now, the man was coming from the back when we came in, so I assume he already knows if Ken is there or not, but Ken probably only comes out if he recognizes my friend.
Sure enough, Ken comes right out all smiles and they have a quick chat. My friend hands over his card and Ken says, "we had to get new equipment, it's now $100, ATM next door".
Ken disappears for about 10 minutes and comes back. My friend gives him cash and away we went. About 4 months later, he had to get it reprogrammed again.
In the satellite realm, DishNetwork was always the easier service to hack. The FTA scene was completely overrun with folks buying 3rd party tuners. Once Dish switched to an encrypted signal, a few vendors (nFusion if I recall) even could rotate keys in a matter of hours to decrypt Dish's new encryption schemes. I doubt any of that works these days simply because there's no reason to push too hard for content that is likely available via easier means.
Nothing.
For this particular instance I don't feel too bad for a number of reasons:
1. Tesla is a luxury product so people on a tight budget will likely find a better value solution elsewhere.
2. The way these locks are implemented greatly restricts user freedom on the whole car so they see somewhat unethical to me.
But in general I believe that making one model and artificially locking it can be ethical. It is just taking advantage of economy of scale (by only making one model) without removing your base price point.
VW Audi Group developed an entire infrastructure called SWaP (Software as a Product) and FEC (Feature Enable Codes) many years ago, and ever since, there has been a cottage industry in bypassing the system to enable features like CarPlay, Navigation, and Performance Monitor which are usually locked by software trim levels.
Do you think there will ever be ECU/TCU tunes maintained as open source projects? Maybe not quite as user-friendly as the Cobb ecosystem and the like, but good enough to make $600+ tunes a thing of the past for DIY types who are into mucking about but want the peace of mind that comes with using maps that enough other people are already using? Not that tuners shouldn't be paid for their work, but I feel like they could focus on the custom tune segment and be ok. My current understanding is that free software exists (I haven't actually played with any myself yet, but I've heard of TunerPro, WinOLS, etc. and I see you maintain VW_Flash, very cool) but then the user needs to know how to create a custom tune from scratch, no free and widely used "off the shelf" / "staged" files floating around for common cars (the main value proposition of APR, EQT, IE, UM, etc.), correct?
Employees have opened their own "stores", where they remove activation locks, or unlock iphones remotely for a small fee.
So, I guess these Tesla hacks should be fine so long as they're only enabling things that the vehicle has been designed to do.
On the other hand, I don't think my car has any unlocked features I want. I mean, I didn't pay for FSD / Autopilot but I'm not sure I'd use either.
In short, there's now a hardware watchdog which reboots the system if anything weird happens to the clocks/temps/voltages, and they carefully structured their boot ROM (the only code they can't patch later) to ensure that even if you somehow manage to sneak one glitch past the watchdog, no single branch condition being inverted will lead to a compromised state.
However, that doesn't make for a stable system when powered from batteries.
I already anonymise my location on Tesla's servers by simply not owning a Tesla
Private ANPR in public spaces is unlawful in I think every EU state?
Does this mean that if I'm filming a vlog at Brandenburg Gate (which inevitably includes video of other people in the background enjoying the area), I'm in violation of privacy laws?
Does that mean if I take a video selfie of me and my family members (which, again, includes images of others in the background, and which is automatically uploaded to icloud) I'm a data processor and am in violation of privacy laws?
I assume there is some line here, but I can't think of the logic separating a person's dashcam from my examples?
No (at least not in France, which also has pretty stringent privacy policy so I think it's still a relevant answer) you can film people or cars in public streets but you cannot do any kind of data processing on the things you film (you can't keep a database with the license plates you have on your personal videos for instance).
In short the line is: pictures and films by themselves are OK [1], but doing anything with the personal info you get from those video is forbidden.
[1]: (under conditions, you must not cause harm in the process: for instance no “happy slapping” videos)
Vlog/youtube would be considered to be potentially commerical .. so you would probably be responsible fore GDPR and likeness recording. (The onious is on you to blur)
Video selfie/photograph personal/non shared use - you're free do this
https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/photography-laws-germany
I am not a lawyer, nor is this legal advice.
Taking photos of specific people in public without their consent: not fine.
I don't know about the law in Germany but I think it is very impolite in any country. You should ask people's permission before putting them online. On Japanese TV they blur out faces of people passing by for example when filming an interview in the street.
There is an exception for personal use - the household exemption - but as soon as you cross the line into commercial operations or certain activities such as publishing, creating databases, etc, you lose the benefit of that exception.
That doesn't mean you can't continue, just that you now need a legal basis and need to follow the rules (inform data subjects, allow the right to be forgotten, etc).
So in general, dashcams are fine (unless a local law prohibits them) as you have a legitimate interest in recording your driving in case of an accident. Creating a facial recognition or ANPR database with the same footage would be unlawful, however.
Private ANPR-equipped vehicles are rare (and outright illegal in some EU states), but when you see them they'll have large decals with the above information on all sides.
Facial recognition is considered biometric data, which is special category data under the GDPR and forbidden to process except in very strict circumstances. Apart from law enforcement/government, it is more or less impossible to lawfully process biometric data with informed consent from the data subject. The household exemption does not apply.
You've got the freedom to aquire an arsenal, I don't, but I prefer the freedom from other people gunning down my kids, which by extension limits the narrow personal freedoms of myself and others.
Likewise, the American perspective is to draw a hard line on "in public", the European one is more nuanced.
Yes, you can film your vlog without fear, but a random pedestrian in Berlin also has the freedom from being associated with your public vlog.
Therefore you have a responsibility to either get their permission to broadcast it, or to anonymize them.
A useful way to think about it is to shift your view from "can I do X?" to "will I bother anyone else by doing X?".
I don't think that's particularly useful, because the answer to the second is trivially Yes, regardless of the value of X.
then don't do it?
I am sorry to dissapoint you and those people, but for now I keep my hair.
You cannot please everyone and I think it is a path into madness to even try it. There are maaany things people feel bothered about …
It depends on the eu country of which there are several...including an ex-eu country.
How it comes accross: One of the things i hate about America is that in new york all the californian building restrictions and zoning are killing free speech.
TBH your comment comes off as very condescending and ill-informed.
When talking about the EU, there are two types of laws (well, three if you include treaties), Directives and Regulations.
Directives are common goals which much be transposed into law by each country and there is indeed differences in implementation. An example of a directive is Directive 2012/27/EU on energy efficiency. It set goals on energy efficiency (and minimum targets), but each country implemented it's own legislation to transpose the Directive into law, and those implementations varied wildly.
However, EU Regulations are a different kettle of fish. Regulations are EU legal acts which are immediately enforceable as national law in all EU states. GDPR is a Regulation and so applies uniformly across the bloc.
Regulations are designed to harmonise legislation across the entire bloc. Obviously there are differences in enforcement, but the ultimate arbiter is the CJEU and decisions are binding in all EU states.
https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/tesla-warns-its-camer...
I believe in Spain, generally speaking, it is legal to record your interactions with someone when you are in public.
But I think many people are not aware that this is legal, including some police officers, because privacy laws are perceived to be quite strict.
Similarly, I think dashcams are actually legal, even though most police probably think they are not.
I think these recordings can even be used in court cases, and in fact in many cases it's probably the reason why they are legal, otherwise it would be hard to see a legitimate purpose that would override the privacy drawbacks.
However, there are restrictions. Indiscriminate recording (i.e. CCTV) of public areas is illegal, as in Germany. This is also true for the entrances of personal homes: you are only allowed to have CCTV outside if it's pointing directly at your door, not the street in general (and you must post a sign).
An obvious restriction is that I think you are not allowed to publish a recording without either anonymizing the people in them or getting their permission.
An interesting restriction that comes to mind is that a few years ago, there was a court case of a man who was caught filming children on a school playground while positioned outside the school, which at the time it was presumed to be for sexual purposes, I think because of the way he was doing the recording (big lenses, I think?) and because he didn't have a legitimate motive for doing that (like being the parent of one of the children, or filming a documentary, etc).
He was sentenced and received a large fine, but I think the legal reasoning was that children on a school playground are expected to have a legal right to privacy, even though it's a public school. So the judge considered it the legal equivalent of filming someone in their private home from outside.
I'm very happy for cases like these where common sense prevails over legal / ideological dogma (even though I'm also aware of the dangers it can pose when laws aren't interpreted to the letter).
I forgot to mention that I highly disagree with this restriction.
It's really, really bad for home and personal security: pointing the CCTV at your door does absolutely nothing when a robber / kidnapper enters your house while wearing a ski mask.
However, pointing the camera outside could much more easily record their identity in the days previous to the crime while they were staking the house (even if they only get caught after the crime), as obviously it's not very feasible to stake a house wearing a ski mask.
Or at least, it would deter them much more heavily and possibly prevent a not-insignificant proportion of kidnapping cases, since most of them seem to occur in people's own homes, which seems to be the easiest choice.
I am similarly an extremely big critic of self-defense laws in European countries, which basically leave you completely defenseless in your own home even if you or your family are being kidnapped, due to the huge asymmetric advantage that an attacker has over you.
Or at the very least, you risk going to jail for many years if anything goes wrong.
Or, if you are in that specific, very small target group for e.g. ransom etc, you probably should've been investing in home security beyond a front door camera anyways.
I am, as are many thousands of other people, in different fields. Although some of my personal circumstances contribute to my risk being especially high, even within these fields.
> you probably should've been investing in home security beyond a front door camera anyways.
I have, to an extent that has been called unreasonable by multiple "normal" people, and these people are not even aware of 90% of the security measures I've taken, including the best ones. Fortunately, my closest family has always been highly supportive in this endeavor.
And these measures are not even half of the recommendations I've been given by security professionals who have scrutinized my life with a fine-toothed comb. Some of these recommendations I've chosen not to take due to not being too adapted to my personal circumstances and lifestyle, but others were amazingly good, far beyond what I expected.
That said, the camera issue, gun restrictions, and strict self-defense laws in Europe are huge limitations that all contribute to vastly decreased personal security for me and my family. And I've been advised by experts in this area, so it's not like I'm setting an unreasonably high standard. I'm also generally anti-guns, but alas, in some cases their benefits outweigh their disadvantages (otherwise police wouldn't carry them) and I think gun laws in Europe don't contemplate this type of situation very well.
It's also a fallacy to think that there is any single set of measures that will protect you. It's not like you can just hire a bodyguard and suddenly you are safe, in fact this can make things even worse in some circumstances.
Physical security can be as much about being careful, having plans in place, keeping a low profile and adding security layers / friction / risk / deterrents as other forms of security such as infosec. In fact, infosec is also a part of physical security nowadays, as well as other similar measures.
But of course, you can't just add every possible security measure, either due to cost or friction / unpleasantness. As an example, almost nobody would like to literally live in a bunker, if you know what I mean.
Also, don't forget to consider that even when you have great home security, it can be very, very easy to bypass it. Even very famous celebrities with great security teams have been kidnapped in modern times, although many of these cases are unknown to the general public. You'd probably be surprised! And that's only the cases that have been made public, most of them are probably not even made public.
Furthermore, your closest family members may not be able to be as vigilant as you, for many different reasons. And it's not even possible to be 100% vigilant all the time, it's extremely easy to get complacent over the years or make mistakes that decrease your security.
To add to all that, attackers have a huge asymmetric advantage during an attack, as they have the surprise element.
Even in germany it is quite easy to legally own a gun. All you have to do is be a member of a Schützenverein ("shooting club") for some time.
What is indeed very hard, is get permission to carry a gun with you.
But your main point seems to have been about home security and having a gun in your home is very possible. Unless you live somewhere with tighter gun laws than germany?
(Also most abductions for ransom happen outside, easier to snatch someone from the road, than come into his home)
"To add to all that, attackers have a huge asymmetric advantage during an attack, as they have the surprise element."
But you can also surprise them with security, they were not aware of and after that initial attack advantage, time is on your side. (Emergency call and panic room).
"It's not like you can just hire a bodyguard and suddenly you are safe, in fact this can make things even worse in some circumstances."
Yeah, because a common bodyguard mainly creates visibility. And the best defense is to not let the attacker know you exist as a target. But there are security guards, that are not visible to the bystander.
And all in all I have to say, that you do sound quite paranoid. And I cannot think of too many professions, where that paranoia in europe is warranted and where you do not have professional security assigned to you, or where you do in fact get permission to carry a weapon. If the walls you build around you are too tight, you eventually just build your own prison.
No, you are completely right, I had forgotten about that possibility!
Indeed, my main worry with gun laws in Europe is about home security, where the advantages can outweigh the drawbacks if you have a high risk profile, not about carrying them in public which I think could lead to other problems.
The hunting guns are much better than nothing, that's for sure!
> (Also most abductions for ransom happen outside, easier to snatch someone from the road, than come into his home)
From my experience (i.e. the many cases I'm familiar with, not that I've been a victim), this is not true, although I'm also familiar with cases like you describe.
But perhaps I'm simply not familiar with the cases that you know about, or about general statistics. I'm more familiar about cases similar to my risk profile.
> But you can also surprise them with security, they were not aware of and after that initial attack advantage, time is on your side. (Emergency call and panic room).
There are scenarios of home invasion for kidnapping purposes that I'm familiar with, which have really happened in Europe not too long ago, and which are impossible to defend against without extreme measures or very significant lifestyle changes, even taking into account what you just mentioned (which I'm obviously familiar with) but I really don't feel comfortable sharing more information.
> Yeah, because a common bodyguard mainly creates visibility.
Indeed, but even ignoring that (and the cost which is usually not a problem in these circumstances) there can also be quite a few more drawbacks that you didn't mention, but again, I don't really want to get into it.
> And the best defense is to not let the attacker know you exist as a target.
Not always possible, but completely agreed in-so-far as you can achieve that as much as possible!
I consider this to be one of the most important goals, assuming you are not a famous person already.
But even then, over the years there have been literally dozens of people who have become familiar with the riskiest part of my situation due to things that are completely outside my control, like different types of legislation which actually force me to disclose the most critical parts of my personal information to dozens of strangers for different (although usually similar) reasons.
Several databases also contain this critical information.
These strangers I mentioned are unlikely to lead to problems themselves, but information can travel easily or be leaked, and it's still an increase in risk.
> And all in all I have to say, that you do sound quite paranoid.
Yes, I'm 100% aware of that :) Don't think I haven't been told this by many people who are not entirely familiar with my situation.
That said, all of the people who have been aware of the details of my situation have shared exactly the same worries as me, and this includes people who have motivation to tell me the harsh truth rather than simply humoring me.
But of course, I try to share all of my details with as few people as possible, for obvious reasons.
In these kind of high-risk stakes, I make sure to really seek honest feedback rather than confirming my biases, because I just want to get the most useful information to make the best decisions I can, accepting that I can be very ignorant about things which I knew almost nothing about (like physical/personal security). The professionals who have assessed my situation have been really clear about all the stupid, unrealistic worries that I had, as well as all the things that I should be really worried about. They have also provided me with a numerical estimate of my personal risk (hopefully much less biased than my perceptions), along with justifications.
Yeah, I know I may be unreasonably paranoid, but on the other hand, are you really paranoid if they are really out to get you? lol!
> And I cannot think of too many professions, where that paranoia in europe is warranted and where you do not have professional security assigned to you, or where you do in fact get permission to carry a weapon.
Indeed, but there are many drawbacks to the solutions you are proposing and not many benefits in my particular situation, although I admit my situation is unusual. But really, I am already sharing more than I am comfortable with.
> If the walls you build around you are too tight, you eventually just build your own prison.
Indeed! That's why you need a good balance and accept some risk, because it's simply not possible to completely avoid it. But since I could afford to, I couldn't help but to take the most reasonable and "lowest hanging fruit" steps I could take to protect my family, under the circumstances.
Imagine not caring very much and then something really bad happens to your child or spouse, how would you feel?
Now, I can at least say that I did put a lot of effort into it, so even if something bad happens, it will be much, much easier for me to accept that the circumstances were simply outside my control.
This actually touches on something I was told by the security professionals I mentioned: some (although very few) of the security measures we've decided to take don't actually provide a meaningful amount of security, but even a tiny incremental improvement disproportionately contributed to us becoming more worry-free / experiencing greater piece of mind and being happier (but of course, this only works if it doesn't continuously affect your quality of life).
And the other thing to mention is that no matter what you do, some things are simply outside your control, so there's no point in obsessing over them, it's just something you have to accept. I think we have been extremely good in this area.
So I am happy to report that after the initial effort was finished (which lasted a few months), we have been able to live with a lot less worries and almost no decrease in quality of life for quite a few years already :)
Indeed, but even ignoring that (and the cost which is usually not a problem in these circumstances) there can also be quite a few more drawbacks that you didn't mention, but again, I don't really want to get into it."
I actually worked a bit in security and so I can tell that some of the other disadvantages are, that most security guys are treated badly, get very lowly paid and their morals are low - so their motivation to potentially sell you out (or not wake up when you need them) is actually quite high. Some high profile companies might be different, but I know I would not trust a common security company with anything (And the company that I worked for had a good reputation and was involved with securing government buildings, but I was a bit shocked to look behind the facade, it all only works, because most criminals are unprofessional as well)
Otherwise you do sound reasonable that you take the appropriate steps, but like you said, it is all about the right balance and yes, you have to accept some risk in life.
But of course, now I am really curious about your risk profile. Seems to be quite an unusual one.. but I can understand, that you don't want to share details. Because unlike often cited here, Security through obscurity is a real thing.
edit: but I have to relativate about the security guys I worked with: some of them were quite bad, but probably none of them would have actually ignored when a child was in danger, or activly helped an attacker for money. They just didn't give a shit in general, so maybe would miss the alarm. And miss doing maintainance in alarm systems etc. And not follow safety protocols (in theory there were actually too many of them, but even the simple and useful ones got ignored)
If your CCTV can only film inside your house, it will not be able to record the identity of a sophisticated attacker.
> If they come in and you get them in vidi then what? Who will you show it to? Police? What are they going to do?
If you are able to record their identity (this is much more likely if you can film outside your house, within an area they would use to stake it), then there are several advantages:
1. Even if you are kidnapped or your house is robbed, it is more likely that the attacker's identity will be recognized, either during this attack, before another attack or even after they are caught in another attack, which would help to increase their sentences.
The chance this will help stop the current attack is minor, although not impossible if law enforcement acts in an expertly fashion (huge "if", I know).
2. For the same reasons above, it is also a huge deterrent, as it greatly increases the risk of the attack (for the attackers, of course), so it also helps to prevent you from being attacked.
3. Furthermore, it shows that you have taken security measures and therefore will increase the chance that the attackers will choose an easier target rather than you.
Is this true?
- filmed: definitely
- recorded: not sure (probably not long term)
- recognized: unlikelyhttps://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...
1 https://dangerousminds.net/comments/foil_facebooks_facial_re...
E.g.: https://www.bmw.com/en/automotive-life/prototype-cars.html
It's also why I started Our Lady of the Anonymity Pool where we gather for music and fellowship, and to recharge and distribute beard screens to our congregants and visitors.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/zxx-fonts-that-google-cant-r...
ID phone Bluetooth on passing, or even facial rec, then it gets tied to gait, and it's forever tied.
Go with what works. Just id people via their phones with a dirtbox.
If it worked this would be a solved case https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/washingtondc/ne...
Better put an apple tag in your car just in case.
Why Steve Jobs Never Had License Plates on His Car https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-car-apple-ceo-l...
Unlike a web browser where W3C AntiFraudCG folk propose that websites would blacklist all impacted AMD-SP hardware and create massive amounts of e-waste[3], Tesla likely can't do much about this attack because Tesla (not users) would be responsible for a very expensive change of vehicle hardware.
If it's not an easy-to-execute attack like faulTPM, there are more complex (but becoming more mainstream and cheaper) IC reverse engineering methods like polishing the die down to take photos of each metal layer and regenerating VHDL, FIB editing an operational IC to bypass tamper detection methods, etc[4].
A security architect of the Xbox One presented a talk[5] a few years ago which provides some good background too. Largely the Xbox One has managed to avoid piracy because they made it economically not worth anyone's time to attack due to competitive pricing models versus high cost of attack. Similar to use of Denuvo for a month or two after release of a PC game, attackers aren't going to bother if their work amounts to nothing a month later.
Hacking a Tesla to enable additional features is worth a lot of money, so the economics are quite different. It's also different economics for printer cartridges, "pay to enable more features or performance" network equipment, etc. The cost of IC reverse engineering / FIB editing attacks (or other future attack methods) will keep reducing. IC tamper detection features will get more complex. Perhaps attackers will even get an advantage once they can readily reverse engineer 3nm ICs and defenders can't do much other than implementing ever more complex and obfuscated IC tamper detection features and VHDL logic (kind of like a Denuvo situation in hardware).
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14717
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35787195
[3] https://github.com/antifraudcg/proposals/issues/19
Building a car in a uniform way for economy of scale savings, fine.
Having a software unlock for hardware you already have (but didn't pay for in the price). Fine.
Using software to rent-seek on one time costs like heated seats. Not fine. Less fine too if the seat subscription can't carry to secondary market. This can he used to cripple secondary markets: sorry, the BMW account you have isn't linked to this VIN. Heated seats and android auto are disabled.
Let's stop the third.
Third is "I pay $5/month for heated seats for the entire time I own the car. Anyone that I sell the car to would also have to pay $5/month for heated seats."
Edit: The other version of the third option (your BMW account is not tied to this vin) is something like "I pay $50 once for heated seats in my car. If I sell it to someone, they also have to pay $50 to unlock the heated seats"
But fundamentally no difference because you are getting a discounted price in exchange for the soft locked feature. So 2 and 3 are the same imo.
Tolerable, perhaps, but pretty far from fine. It's pretty shocking to me that people in our society build things and then deliberately break them so they can make more money. Is this really the best system we can come up with?
We have built a society where what is plainly crazy is rational.
All part of cost tradeoffs. Previously, they'd build the car with the ability to support all those add-ons even if the customer isn't getting them. Turns out it's cheaper not to do that.
Like the barebones Tesla 3 that existed on paper but was basically impossible to order. OE’s know most people will spring for that creature comforts.
The core idea is that if some amount of people want heated seats the most cost effective way to do that may be to add the seats to every car, then those who want it pay that cost. (So if 1/5 cars want the heated seats each car have effective cost of 5x the per car cost because for each person paying they also have to cover the cost to install the hardware into 4 cars that wont pay for it) However that cost is still likely much cheaper than setting up a completely new physical model (especially if you consider feature combinations). But if you enable this feature for everyone then no one is paying the "premium" price so the cost needs to be spread out across all sales.
It's not as bad as it looks. If you think about it, it's basically a form of wealth redistribution.
Rich people will pay the premium, which subsidizes the cost of the car for others. In other words, poorer customers will get a cheaper car.
It's a pretty good deal for those who are less wealthy and don't really need the extra functionality.
Also, these poorer customers can always upgrade later if want to (because circumstances change and they want the functionality or because they get richer and can afford more luxury). This is not always possible with hardware-based customization, or even if it is, it would be more expensive.
The alternative would be to only install the extra hardware in the cars of the wealthier customers, but presumably this would make the car more expensive for everyone (both the poor and the rich owners), due to the added costs of hardware-based customization. So everyone would lose.
And even if the latter is not true, a similar car manufacturer could just offer you a better deal by selling you a similar, cheaper car without installing the hardware, which means that the manufacturer/brand that does the shenanigans would lose customers. Competition is pretty awesome like that.
This sorta thing is usually done because retooling an assembly line so the car can have different features can be incredibly costly. It's often the case that all cars are built with the same features and the cost of this hardware is also included the price of the cheaper car with the features disabled. The "rich people" just pay a premium to have 'off' switched to 'on'.
1. This scenario makes the car cheaper for the poorer customers, so they benefit from it. Or at least, it doesn't increase the price, so they get the added benefits of being able to upgrade their car more easily and cheaply than going to back to the shop to install the extra hardware.
2. Or, this situation makes the car more expensive for the poorer customers, but since they are much more price sensitive, it is very likely that they will choose to go to a competitor who actually sells them a similar car without the additional hardware (therefore cheaper), or without subscriptions.
Unless of course, there was a monopoly or cartel, but I don't think we are in that situation.
The fact that these companies are going in this direction, indicates that they are able to profit more in this situation, which indicates that they are providing more value (again, unless their customers didn't have a reasonable choice). It's not proof, but it's evidence that there are advantages.
That said, it's not as simple as I've just put, because sometimes it can be easy to trick people into making a worse choice for themselves in the long term, e.g. due to marketing, or buying things with credit or as subscriptions instead of one-time payments, for example.... which can definitely apply in this case!
Pardon my ignorance, but if the cost of the hardware is already baked into the cost of the cheapest options, which means they are paying for all of the hardware they have in their cars, including the hardware they can't use, how do they benefit? Cost, in that situation, is determined simply by the need to assemble efficiently. I can't see how the consumer benefits in that scenario by paying for something they can't use.
Responding to your edit:
>Or at least, it doesn't increase the price, so they get the added benefits of being able to upgrade their car more easily and cheaply than going to back to the shop to install the extra hardware.
Again, pardon my ignorance, but it feels disingenuous to call it "an upgrade" if the car already has the equipment, especially to be charged more to use what you've already paid for.
Am I crazy?
The customer can be receiving extra hardware and still be paying a cheaper price due to the assembly line efficiencies you mentioned, as well as the support costs of having just one new car model every year instead of 10 slightly different car models every year.
In other words, the additional hardware costs might be lower than the other cost reductions due to the increased efficiency.
Furthermore, even if the customer is paying exactly the same as before for the car (but now they are getting additional hardware which they can't use), it would be cheaper and much easier for these customers to upgrade their car if they so choose.
This would also mean higher profits for the car manufacturers, which allows them to reduce the initial purchase price of the cars to compete more effectively in the market.
And if it turns out that the car is more expensive due to having to buy the additional hardware, since these customers are price-sensitive they can just go to a competitor who would sell them a car without the additional hardware, therefore cheaper.
EDIT:
> Again, pardon my ignorance, but it feels disingenuous to call it "an upgrade" if the car already has the equipment, especially to be charged more to use what you've already paid for.
Perhaps that's because you're only considering the cost of the hardware and not all the other costs of producing and supporting all the different car models for every combination of hardware features each customer would choose?
I mean, yeah, sure, car companies could just sell a car with all the hardware features enabled and charge all customers the same, but then the price of the cars would be higher for those who don't need all those features, as the company wouldn't be able to charge higher prices for premium customers to subsidize the cars for the "poorer" customers.
The idea is that the “cheaper” models are getting the hardware at a discount. Very simply: are getting $30,000 of hardware for $25,000 because features aren’t active. Others are willing to pay $35,000 for the same hardware with the features active. Obviously this example is over simplification of pricing and value, but that’s the general idea.
If the manufacturer hadn't done this, they would have to produce at least 2 versions of the car: one without any extra hardware, and one with all the extra hardware.
It may turn out that doing separate versions of the car could cost $5,000 more per car over its entire lifetime, including production (extra design, assembly lines, etc) and support, rather than simply making one version of the car.
So if the car company hadn't done this, the car might have cost $30,000 anyway without the extra features, and $35,000 with the extra features, so the poorer customers would lose while the rich customers would pay the same.
This works more or less the same if these costs are comparable or higher than the costs of the extra hardware. And I suspect they are higher, as it seems highly likely that the price for these premium features in cars are a lot higher than the actual costs of the hardware itself.
Sure, the company could still engage in the same wealth redistribution / subsidization / price differentiation in the 2-car scenario (and they likely already do), but everyone could still lose anyway because the total costs of all the cars could still be higher in total.
The way to think about it is that the people paying for these extra features / buying the premium model with software-unlocked features are paying to add these features (locked) to every car sold. Because this is cheaper than making a different physical model.
For example imagine that 1/5 people want heated seats. Assume that adding these seats costs $100 to the manufacturing costs of a single car. There are two options here:
1. Create a new model. This makes the base model cost more (because you are making 1/5 less units so the overhead of design, validation and setting up the production line is spread across less cars) and makes the premium model cost much more (because you are only making 1/5 of the units). So maybe now you add $10 to the cost of the base model and $1000 to the cost of the premium model.
2. Add the seats to all models. This raises the cost of the car by $100.
Let's imagine that the base model price shouldn't be affected by the addition of the premium model. So we want all of this extra cost to be passed to the premium model. In scenario 1 this is effectively $1040 extra per car ($1k for premium + $10x4 base models). In scenario 2 this is effectively $500 per car ($100 x 5).
So option 1 doesn't make sense. It costs more for no real benefit.
> I can't see how the consumer benefits in that scenario by paying for something they can't use.
This is the thing. In theory the base model doesn't need to pay extra. Yes, their car was more expensive to make, but this cost was paid for by those who bought the premium model.
I don't know if I would argue that the consumer of the base model "benefits". Their model could be subsidized, or it could cost more, money is fungible in that way. But there is no reason why having this hardware installed but locked should increase the price that they pay. Without further evidence one would hope that the price of the car is unaffected by the premium model. Or maybe even cheaper because of benefits of the economy of scale (especially if the ratio of people buying the expensive model is higher).
I wrote a post about this a while ago with very simple examples of how the math works out https://kevincox.ca/2023/05/14/ethics-of-locked-hardware/
The margin on a car isn't the margin on the materials and labour of that individual car on the line.
Many base models barely break even and recoup some costs in dealer servicing, finance and whatnot.
If software locks (not subscription) enable more of the subsidising then I'm all for it. Also I'm for it as hackers we can get around the limitations.
Rent seeking is always a bad thing for the consumer however.
Ok as long as /any/ end run around that garbage made by the car's /owner/ is specifically: legal, legitimate and not-warranty voiding.
Because you know the step from there to not being able to repair the things you own without paying more to allow you to do so is nonexistent.
If they don't present value for money at a given price point (including these sorts of shenanigans), don't buy it. So long as you know about these issues up front I don't think it's that problematic (even if it feels a bit wasteful in a holistic sense)
Until legislation is passed, you will only pry my dumbcar from my cold dead hands.
If the feature is implemented by locking down the whole infotainment system or I need a new passphrase every month and its going to break when Tesla servers are down then I am less fine with that.
I think if you can accurately lock off a feature without affecting the rest of the user's freedom than that is pretty fair. (Sort of like CPU manufactures burning fuses to disable cores or features) But if the lock depends on locking down the entire system and restricting how I use the bits that I did pay for then I start to have a problem with it.
Sorry, WHAT? People should absolutely boycott companies that try to squeeze bucks in this miserable way.
That was later outlawed with the "first-sale doctrine": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
I would say that it seems like it's time for some new legislation that supports consumer freedom. But given the state of American politics, I can only hope that Europe will do some pioneering work on this.
Option A: A vehicle that lacks the hardware for heated seats, heated steering wheel, and driver assist that costs $25,000 to produce and that you pay $25,000 for. If you want these items next year, you have to buy a new vehicle.
Option B: A vehicle that includes the hardware for heated seats, heated steering wheel, and driver assist that costs $27,000 to produce. You can pay $25,000 now and those features aren’t enabled. But next year you can enable them for a nominal fee. Or you can pay $30,000 now and there are enabled for life. Or $27,000 now and a $500/year subscription fee that you can later cancel.
If not having two separate designs and production lines means less cost to make that a reality, that seems like a reasonable trade off to me.
Do tell. I'm always keen on hearing why people prefer no regulation in the automotive space.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscription...
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/automakers-bmw-gm-mercedes-char...
1. Lower total cost of manufacturing (which should be passed on to consumers as lower purchase price).
2. The cost of this hardware is only paid for those who value it.
3. You can add these features later (maybe your budget is tight when you bought the car but want to add it later).
I am definitely not a fan of the subscription model for hardware features, but I think that locking features to the customers paying for it is a logical way to make these features available for less cost. If the unlock is one-time and reliable (doesn't rely on some external service to validate your subscription) then I don't have a fundamental problem with it.
I don't think providing a cheaper model is "punish[ing] them for paying less". It is making the car accessible to a wider audience. If the cheapest model included heated seats, self driving and more then they base price would be higher and the car would be less accessible.
Software locking like this is bad for environmental / waste reasons. All of this complaining about there being a disconnect between what you willingly paid for and what the physical hardware components in the product you receive can technically do, is just a nerd’s argument. I agree with it. Subscriptions suck when there’s no ongoing cost to the seller. But I’m not going to pretend that this is some moral crusade, or be as emotionally invested as you quite obviously are.
Personally, I think it's a terrible idea in that it further changes the relationship between buyers and sellers toward a relationship of long-term exploitation. It takes the notion of enshittification [1] and extends it into the realm of physical goods.
[1] https://kottke.org/23/01/the-enshittification-lifecycle-of-o...
Unless it’s something that requires the car manufacturer to also spend money on an ongoing basis (e.g. a cell data connection or something) it strikes me as absolutely immoral that these companies are going to band together and force this arrangement upon us.
IBM and I'm sure others have shipped enterprise hardware for years that was partially locked. You might get a machine with 16 cpus but you only paid for 8, for example, but you could license the rest as you grew. It seems a little similar and it was in no way underhanded, everyone knew what the deal was.
However I'll echo what another poster said. I say Tesla should be free to sell whatever they want, but if the end user finds a way around it too bad.
I think thats the stance I'm leaning towards as well. To quote another commenter[1]:
> If a manufacturer wants to lock features behind a paywall, that is fine. However, they shouldn't be allowed to complain when consumers modify the thing they bought to get around that paywall. If Tesla really wants to make sure absolutely no one gets FSD or heated seats without paying, then they should make a point of only including the relevant hardware or software in the vehicle at the time of purchase.
To take that business practice, and then try to foist it on consumers who don't have $500/hour lawyers on retainer looking out for them is more than just morally questionable, it crosses a line into some sort of fraud/extortion-adjacent realm.
If Tesla was really upset about this, it's a problem completely within their capacity to solve. Only send bugfixes OTA, require a service visit for new features. I'm betting that their software's such a trainwreck they wouldn't be able to compartmentalize it properly like that to save their own lives.
Their cars from 2013 can still get modern features OTA. Please explain how you classify that as a train wreck compared to software cobbled together from 100 vendors (none of whom specialize in software)
Tesla gets plenty of software from other vendors. And doesn't always test it particularly well - there was a story here of a firmware vendor who had a test harness that took ~36h to verify. They shipped a bug fix to Tesla, told them it was available...
... four hours later, "Great, this is awesome, looks like we fixed the issue."
???
"We just flashed one of the cars here and took it for a drive."
The same should go for DVDs, BluRays and streaming media and yet here we are looking at jail time for bypassing the DRM.
Even in the US, which has quite draconian anti-circumvention law under the DMCA, the criminal penalties associated with this behavior only apply to those that violate the statute “willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain”. A person who bought a DVD or blu ray and decrypted it for their own use would not be criminally liable.
https://law.justia.com/codes/us/2021/title-17/chapter-12/sec...
I’m not defending the law, which I disagree with, merely pointing out that “looking at jail time” for non commercial bypassing of purchased BluRay DRM is a stretch.
What I’m vehemently opposed to is ongoing fees for things that don’t have ongoing costs. BMW wants to charge monthly for seat heaters or carplay, but those things are not a service and don’t have ongoing costs for BMW to provide. If anything creating an ongoing software lock creates an availability risk. If BMW’s authorization service is unavailable do you lose heated seats?
Several manufacturers are offering either monthly or one time costs for certain features. I’m less clear how I feel about that. Maybe quite valuable for someone who lives somewhere warm and only needs seat heat one month a year. It would take many years of paying for a single month to justify paying for the fully unlocked feature. I think I can live with optional monthly fees for things as long as you can always pay once and just have something that stays for her life of the car.
And auto-renew should require explicit opt-in. For most subscriptions I have, automatic renewal is desirable, but invariably I forget to cancel trials or one month subs of things I just wanted to test.
IMO, the real issue is the price. There is pretty broad and well established equivalency between OPex and CAPex. The problem is that car companies are trying to charge OPex as if there was a 1 year depreciation schedule, when cars typically last for decades.
I think that if BMW charged 1/240th[1] the cost to buy the option in order to rent it per month, very few people would complain. Especially if that price were locked in for the life of the car.
---
1. 20 * 12 = 240
One of the worst problems with this subscription-based everything is that it creates an ongoing reliance on the company instead of allowing things to be pure local.
For example Netflix downloads are a huge pain because of refreshing and re-verifying. In theory these wouldn't exist if they didn't need to worry about your license expiring. You would never run into a scenario where you couldn't play the video that was stored locally because they can't prove that you are still subscribed (even though I'm only half way through my month so it is literally impossible for my subscription to have ended yet).
So yes, if I could guarantee that I could pay a fairly reasonable price for as long as I wanted to and it would work flawlessly for that entire time it wouldn't be too bad. But in practice I can't rely on that and have to dread the day I am offline and can't get heated seats or they take the licensing server down since it wasn't worth maintaining for the 8 people who are still subscribed to this service.
The manufacturing price delta between an 8 core CPU and a 16 core, nowadays is functionally meaningless.
The manufacturing cost between a car with heated seats and without headset seats is functioningaflly meaningful.
The way I see it, for things like heated seats or CarPlay, I'm already paying for the base hardware cost (plus some margin) as part of the base price of the car, charging me for the upgrade is charging me a markup on what I already paid for. Making it a service is insult to injury.
Citation needed. The way assembly lines and product mix work, it could be meaningfully less expensive to have all the hardware be identical with software unlocks.
Semi yields?
I don't believe that is the case. BMW determined it was more expensive to have the supply chain, inventory, and manufacturing management to build both heated and non-heated versions of their seats. Rather than just make heated seats a standard feature they saw an opportunity to maintain and even expand their highest margin revenue stream: options.
You could probably buy something that would heat your seat at home for under $4 on Temu. And that includes multiple middle companies and shipping across the ocean. It probably costs them pennies, where the upside is, this owner doesn't want heated seats, but a car can easily have 2-3 owners in its first 10 years. maybe the 2nd and 3rd owners will want the heated seats, worth the money it would take to install it
They were entire cpus in sockets.
That's because you don't understand.
The customer didn't pay for a car with heated seats. The manufacturer included them anyway, but disabled them in software.
Presumably, a consumer could go to the dealership and pay for heated seats as an aftermarket add-on. Or they could pay to enable heated seats (software unlock) on a month-to-month basis.
Well, when you buy a car your payment gives you ownership of the entire car.
There may not be a written contract or specification explicitly saying that the valves in the tyres are included in the deal, but they're your property nonetheless (in the absence of obvious errors like the dealer letting you drive the wrong car off the lot)
The customer paid for a car with heated seats present but inoperable. If the customer wants to modify their property, that's their business.
Sure.
> If the customer wants to modify their property, that's their business.
If you were talking about a vacuum cleaner or something, I'd agree. But modern cars are "fly by wire". It is not, in fact, only the customer's business if they modify their car's software.
A book is copyrighted too, but when I buy one, I can legally write in it, paste in pages of my own, cut out pages, etc.... I can even sell it after I've done that.
I'm 95% certain the law should be changed to restore the first sale concept to software, and even more certain when it comes to embedded software that's necessary to use hardware owned by end-users.
Not saying that BMW is in the right. Hell yeah they are extracting every penny they can, but you can simply protest by not buying from them. People support their decisions by buying their products and complain afterwards. There are many alternatives.
Sure they did. Maybe they didn't pay the full price for those heated seats, but they definitely paid more for the car with them (but disabled) than for a car without them entirely.
The carmaker is hoping that people will pay for the unlock in order to recoup their costs. But they're certainly not going to ship those heated seats in every car without inflating the cost of the base vehicle by some amount.
Put another way, it might look like this:
1. Car without heated seats at all: $10,000
2. Car with heated seats, but locked: $10,100
3. Car with heated seats, unlocked: $10,500
If the carmaker offered options 1 & 3, then customers would pay for what they want and get, and nothing more. If carmakers only offer option 2, then even customers who don't ever want heated seats will still pay some premium.
The carmaker might estimate that only 50% of their customers will pay an unlock fee for a car sold to them. They want to still cover their costs and make a tidy profit, so they might charge more than the $400 difference to unlock the feature. And that's if they're doing it in the non-shady way, and are charging a one-time fee. If they decide to charge a subscription, they might do something like charge $100/year for it, and then eventually they're just making pure profit for no added value.
Also consider that the carmaker's own costs could be, on average, greater per car if they have to offer two different options 1 & 3. Offering only option 2 (regardless of whether or not people are able to defeat the software lock) might be cheaper for them. I don't see why we need to subsidize their business decisions.
But all of this is still kinda irrelevant: bottom line is that if you sell piece of hardware to a customer, that hardware now belongs to the customer, and you don't get to tell the customer what they can and can't do with it.
You can also picture this as a marketing cost. Maybe Tesla things that a $100/car marketing cost is worth paying because they expect that 1/2 of the cars will pay $500 so they have $150 expected return.
the upside is that by not having much difference between SKUs, and "locking" one SKU from becoming the other, the costs are lower, and manufacturers might turn those savings into lower prices
in both cases, as in cell phones, I believe like you still own the hardware, including everything in it, including software [1], so if you want to "unlock it", that's your right, as is smashing it, reflashing it, and having sex with it. If that makes for an unsustainable business model, nobody is entitled to their preferred business model being sustainable. Analogous examples here might be unofficial Keurig pods, or printer ink cartridges, which bypass manufacturer DRM intending to lock customers into an otherwise arguably unsustainable business model.
sometimes, though, you have to fight for your rights, e.g. build/buy/download and use unofficial tools
[0]: http://computer-communication.blogspot.com/2007/06/unlocking...
[1]: this inclusion stems from my belief that, where possible, you have an absolute right to view every bit of data that happens across hardware you own, whether gadgetry or eyeballs, in any format you desire, as well as the right to remember what you've viewed, as well as the right to modify or prevent modification of any arbitrary bit on said hardware
Especially if that rent-seeking doesn't come with any kind of support for the "offering".
If the heated-seats break for a "subscriber", will BMW repair them for no additional cost?
That said I am trying to play devil's advocate here. Other people have mentioned the analogy of locking out some CPUs on a die for a cheaper version of hardware, and I think that kind of applies here, at least for a one time payment.
If I'm willing to accept that, is it so unreasonable that they could rent this feature to me, even if it's only a software switch? After all, the idea of renting physical property isn't very controversial.
Again, I don't like the idea and would never want to rent the heated seats software switch, but I'm having a hard time justifying why it shouldn't be allowed.
People should not be constrained in doing whatever they want with the hardware they have bought.
Even on game consoles, the “DLC” is often a couple meg download because the actual content is already built into the game.
You could turn Windows NT 3.51 Workstation into Server by just changing a registry key!
https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/differences_nt.htm...
Expecting capitalism to be fair is probably where we're all going wrong here.
It would be the same if the volume rockers on the iPhone would only work if you have a paid subscription, or if you needed to pay extra to unlock 120fps while the device is capable but locked to 60fps because you’re not giving Tim Cook more money.
This makes it easy for me to make up my mind about. FSD is about far more than just the hardware - there's many teams of devs working on it.
> heated seats
There's little (no?) justification for software locking heated seats. Press the button, make the seats hot. This is just capitalist bullshit and we shouldn't put up with it.
Some people don't want to pay for heated seats. Turns out the manufacturer found it cheaper to just include the hardware anyway rather than differentiate on the production line. What's the big deal? The ability to change your mind and pay for the feature after purchase without getting an aftermarket seat heater seems like a nice bonus. Everyone wins.
Sure, maybe they have a lower markup if you don't buy the license up front, but you still paid for it. These types of gimmicks are free money for the company pulling them.
Edit: Hell, to make it sound even more stupid, you're being asked to fork over $1k or whatever the additional charge is in order to change a bit from 0 to 1.
Obviously, I don't like up-paying for features I don't get to use. The price of the product must be the same, having benefited from mass production. With that being the case, I'm actually glad I have the option to save money now and upgrade later.
The concept isn't a problem, it's companies taking advantage of it (and us).
To borrow a phrase you used earlier, I truly don't believe that we need to come to terms with companies blurring this line and taking advantage of us.
Which is a real thing that has actually happened.
The functionality exists, the code already has been written, but it's disabled so as to extract more money.
The arguments about cheaper manufacturing is pretty well pointless. If the cost of adding seat heaters is negligible, what justification is there for charging extra? You pay for the hardware either way. This is rent seeking and nothing more.
This is a topic that's been beaten to death in the electronics industry for years. Oscilloscope manufacturers design and sell a 500MHz scope, but cripple it to 200MHz unless you pay 50% more. Or they put 16MSample of memory in and restrict you to 8 unless you pay $400 for an "upgrade". The cost of buying the lower model and upgrading it later is usually much higher than just buying the high end model.
In any case, it's not like manufacturers are selling the lower tier model at a loss. They're taking lower margins on the crippled hardware, yes, but then they charge you ridiculous prices that are orders of magnitude above the real cost of the additional hardware.
Not true. The price you have decided you are willing to pay assumes it is not there. Your payment allocates no portion to the hardware. If you have decided a car is worth $30,000, that is what you are willing to pay, regardless of whether or not they include the hardware.
And, in actuality, you might even consider a car with said hardware to be worth less as it adds weight which will require more fuel and wear and tear expenses over the operating lifetime of the vehicle. The car worth $30,000 without heated seats is, perhaps, only worth $29,000 if the hardware is included.
The cost to manufacturer is their problem. Your value determination is entirely independent of that. Should it cost them $1 or $100,000 to build that $30,000 car – it doesn't matter. You are paying for the value you think you will derive from owing the car, not what it cost them to make it.
Indeed, in the long run the value has to exceed the cost of manufacture, else the business will soon find itself filing for bankruptcy. But in the short term, it is not uncommon to see input costs exceed the value of the product, resulting in a net loss for the business. The buyer doesn't care. Input costs mean absolutely nothing to them.
If it's that cheap then it should just always be included, period. Otherwise it's just transparent greed. Why charge your customers extra for something that costs you literally nothing extra? Why not do the same for everything? The radio volume knob is software-locked and it's either at 100% or off, unless you pay extra to unlock it. The entertainment system will play ads continuously while the car is running unless you pay extra for the no-ads version. When you unlock the doors they will stay locked for five more minutes unless you pay extra for the Instant Unlock feature.
So they make a cheaper version, with lower margins, but they deliberately cheapen the experience so that those who can afford the "luxury" version don't buy the "cheap" version instead.
In any case, it shouldn't change anything for the end user, hardware or software, you pay a premium for premium features. And even if it involves actual hardware, it will cost you a lot more than what the part is worth. That's how manufacturers target both the premium and budget market with the same product. I think it benefits most people in the end, especially on the "cheap" side since people can get something they wouldn't be able to afford at all otherwise, at the cost of a bit of luxury.
Now, you can get smart, buy the cheap version and hack the software, or install much cheaper third party hardware. Same idea as ink refills for printers, or ad-blocking ad-supported websites. Often, that's you right, but don't expect the manufacturer to play along, you are on your own.
Because that's not how business works, whether cars, computers, or any other widget. The cost of manufacturing is only tangentially related to the retail value.
Your examples, while contrived, could easily work the same way. As long as the customer knows what they're buying, and there are other choices on the market, then we will find out pretty quickly how valuable a non-binary volume knob is.
You may not want to know the answer to that one, if you pay much attention to airline ticket pricing and consumer behavior.
Welcome to capitalism, it seems you are new here.
> Why charge your customers extra for something that costs you literally nothing extra?
Because (1) you can, and (2) it maximizes profit.
> Why not do the same for everything?
Because of estimates about what people will accept not having in the base model and what some will be willing yo pay extra for. Why do you think there would be some other principal at work here?
In the former case, I didn't pay you money, so you didn't give me a good / service / whatever. That feels fair, because you need money to provide those things.
In the latter case, I didn't pay you money, so you didn't flip a switch. That seems like a dick move.
So I guess the difference is that in only one of these cases does it feel like the manufacturer is an asshole.
This is the case for all software. There is no physical exchange of goods, and nearly zero effort to distribute the bits.
a car is hardware, not software, even if it interacts with software
the fact that the switch is implemented via software is irrelevant to the fact that hardware is more analagous, e.g. a printer you want to use off-brand cartridges in, or a cell phone you want to root
I bought a kindle fire at a discount because it was ad-supported, then rooted it and removed all the adware+bloatware, and don't feel even a little bit bad, because all I was doing was using my hardware as I saw fit
sorry not sorry that this breaks amazon's business model (in reality it's so rare it doesn't), but my hardware, my property, my rules
Some people don't want to pay for a 4th bedroom. Turns out the builder found it cheaper to just include the extra bedroom rather than differentiate on blueprints. What's the big deal? The ability to change your mind and increase your mortgage without having to deal with construction in the future seems like a nice bonus. Everyone wins.
If the customer only paid for 1 bedroom, they're going to save a lot of money. It's the extra maintenance costs of that roof and the associated space taken up by the structure that would make it a harder sell, otherwise dynamically growing living space would be very interesting.
Also, how will you keep me out of the room in my house that I didn't buy? You can't effectively.
A creative tenant could certainly break through a wall that's been put up in place of a door, but that seems pretty extreme. I've seen some creative construction projects to make use of crawl spaces that weren't originally designed for people to live in though, but that's far from the norm.
On the other hand, such regulation would serve to prevent users from enjoying the property they purchased and to facilitate exploitative practices by manufacturers and retailers. It is all the more absurd given that existing law already provides mechanisms for deterrence and punishment, namely: the notion of negligence.
I cannot stress how terrible this idea is. This would severely degrade consumer rights and do virtually nothing to protect people.
If you are messing with safety critical software then it is no help to me that you are prosecuted for negligence if I am killed.
Even if your safety critical software works it still is negligent, there should be some barrier to entry for such software. It shouldn't be out there in the wild made by whoever with no oversight.
Writing your own self driving software, go ahead, as long as your driving on private land I have no issue.
(Tesla's software killing people is also not their responsibility, because you're 'supposed' to use it in a way that nobody actually uses it.)
No such thing as impossible to bypass, which is exactly why companies turn to the courts and police for enforcement instead.
Instead, we have bullshit like the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions that companies pushed so they could get the government to legally enforce their crappy business models.
While I intuitively agree with you, I'm having a hard time arguing against the economic argument in favor it. Producing a single version of a product is generally cheaper than producing two different versions. Also offering a lower-margin, software-locked variant can (in certain conditions) make things cheaper for everyone, and it gives the consumer more choice: if you don't need or want the features of the premium model, you don't have to pay for it.
For example, imagine a manufacturer that sells two versions of its product, a basic model that makes up 20% of sales which costs $1000 to manufacture, and a premium model that makes up 80% of sales and costs $1250 to manufacture; this gives an average cost of $1200/unit. If they can save $100 per unit by only manufacturing the premium version and software-locking it, that reduces the average cost of goods sold to $1150/unit. They can pass on half of the savings to the customer, and still come out $50/unit ahead.
Now lets talk about CO2 output of driving around extra dead weight. Makes it worse.
Let's say instead that BMW decided all their car models would be physically 4 seaters, but in order to be allowed to use the back two seats, you had to pay a large monthly "sedan fee". And if they caught you using the back seats without paying, they'd sue you. Would anyone accept this? Likely no. And the reason you shouldn't accept this is the same reason you shouldn't accept the "seat heat" fee.
Either way if I truly think I am right, then BMW, etc should just go ahead with this plan. It should be a money loser for them in the long run. But on second thought why burn all this CO2 just to prove a point. We should probably collectively put a stop to it sooner rather than later.
I wouldn't be so sure, it's all about the price. There's plenty of people that don't have a need for the backseats, and at a certain discount on the purchase price it becomes worth it to have two unusable seats in the back of the car. Think about the extreme case, in which the car is free: there are certainly people that would take that deal.
But you're supposed to get a ticket. Or is it fair game to use public transport for free because you can?
We're talking about a few grams of extra weight on an ICE vehicle over 1.5 tons, if not even an SUV over two tons. If you put a spare bottle of water in your car you'll most likely have similar dead weight.
Now, I get where you're coming from, but the amount of dead weight this adds is so miniscule compared to the general overhead any modern vehicle carries that making this argument is borderline disingenuous.
But a few grams is definitely not correct. It's probably more on the order of 3-5lbs per seat.
If we don't like the heated seat example, let's use power seats. Those are much heavier than the equivalent seat with manual controls to adjust its position and angle. Granted, I don't know of any car manufacturer gating power seats behind a software lock...
Then we can add in the CO2 emission of manufacturing dead material to place in the car.
To top it all off, no one wants this.
Or to put it in another perspective: carmakers have never optimized for weight at the cost of everything else (as otherwise we'd all be driving around in cars made from titanium or carbon fiber). What's the difference between putting in a heavier seat with a non-functional heater to reduce production costs, and using steel instead of aluminium to reduce production costs?
Option A: Buy our car for $50,000
Option B: Buy our car for $40,000, but we'll software lock the "full self driving" feature
It sounds bad if you frame it as the company withholding functionality. It sounds better if you frame it as the company offering a discount, given some software stipulations.
This is really about paying for software. When you spend $400 for Ableton Live you are "unlocking" new capabilities for your PC. When you buy the latest PC game you are "unlocking" new capabilities for your GPU.
If you wanted to do all this yourself you are technically able to do so, at great difficulty and expense. You could develop your own software to operate your vehicle. (Not advisable.)
I prefer to look at it as a value proposition, rather than a battle of ideals. If a car with x, y, and z features disabled at a price of a is attractive to you, then buy it. If not, don't.
First, they absolutely will not pass the savings on to the customer. Prices are governed by what people will pay, not by what it costs to make the car. If they can make the cars for $100 cheaper, they will pocket the $100, unless market forces (like cheaper cars from other manufacturers) signal that they should lower their prices.
Second, heated seats are heavier than non-heated seats. Customers who get software-locked heated seats and don't want the feature will get slightly worse gas mileage or EV range. So not only is the manufacturer potentially saving money building the car (savings they likely are not passing on to the customer), but they're pushing added operational costs onto the customer.
I think it's fine (though somewhat shady[0]) for a company to use these sorts of software interlocks. But the product sold to the customer belongs to the customer. If they want to hack or mod it to disable that software interlock, the company should just have to live with that, and shouldn't be allowed to punish the customer in other ways (like refusing to provide software updates, refusing to do maintenance, making that maintenance more expensive, etc.).
[0] Ultimately they can do whatever is legal. But customers don't like being nickel-and-dimed for things, and doing too much of this might cause customers to find alternatives. For example, I refuse to fly on super-low-cost airlines like Frontier and Spirit because I don't want a super-bare-bones experience where I have to pay extra for every little quality of life improvement. Flying is already not a particularly great experience, and I don't care to make it worse. It's Frontier & Spirit's prerogative to operate like that (and clearly enough customers are fine with it for these companies to be successful), but it's also my choice to spend my money elsewhere. But if the only option was airlines like these (or car manufacturers who software-lock everything), that would really suck.
For FSD, part of the payment is for ongoing maintenance. It is likely that the countermeasure would be subscriptions, and they already seem to be progressing in that direction.
It might be possible to subscribe to FSD, wait for it to download, then unsubscribe, and hack it to re-enable the firmware. But FSD is still beta and you'd be risking being exposed to get future updates.
If you enabled a seat heater, enabling hardware that the car already has installed, or hot-rodding the engine, I don't think it is that big a deal.
But if you downloaded and installed software from tesla that didn't come with the car, or did something like enabling free supercharging, that would be more like theft of services.
I expect if this becomes a thing, features will have to be downloaded after purchase.
1) If tesla took possession of the used car and then sold it to you, I think they can disable features.
2) If you sold your car to someone, and THEN tesla disabled features I am not ok with that.
With case #1, I think it is like any used car. People flip cars. They can take a car, remove expensive rims or other options and sell the car without them. People also buy cars and part them out, selling each piece individually. This is ok because the flipper owns the car before selling it and they can do what they want.
If the seller didn't tell the buyer, or the seller themselves didn't know - who's fault is that?
Basically everyone with this car is paying for 95% the actual hard work of what you need for the fog lights already. Very few owners end up going for the fog lights but everyone subsidizes their installation.
Till this day it wasn't a problem since this was not really locked down, and despite the fact that is illegal, people did modify the car software to unlock more power quite easily.
But... that "locking" of feature kind of made sense, since a car with less kW pays less taxes (at least in my country you pay more if the car is more powerful) so selling a locked down model was also an advantage for the user that wasn't interested in having more.
Locking down heated seats... it's just a move against the user. Buying a car you payed for that seats, since they are there, why the manufacturer should ask you another fee to use for something you already payed? To me this shouldn't be possible.
I mean, it's easy to get 20% more power out of an engine if you don't care if it idles like a washing machine. And for some applications, that's just fine.
Can you explain this? How does remapping an ecu make the idle different?
Features cost money, so I should pay for them. Wether that's via an option package (traditional) at order time OR via a software update (Tesla) after purchase doesn't matter.
BUT! As long as that feature doesn't have recurring costs to the manufacturer (heated seats), it should be a one-time fee, and transfer with ownership.
Something like self-driving, where there might be an active internet connection and server costs - I'm ok with a recurring subscription.
Examples... BMW tried to charge a subscription to use Apple CarPlay. This should be a one-time fee (baked into model price, or a one-time software switch). Same for Toyota (I think) who tried to make remote-unlock a subscription (this was basic key fob unlock - no internet hosting/app maintenance involved). Also crappy move from them.
Hacking otherwise reasonable software-locked features feels like theft to me. If you want the feature, pay for it. At minimum, I'd expect Tesla (or whoever) to void warranties on cars with these hacks applied (within the bounds of Magnuson-Moss Act in the US).
Telsa chose to do this presumably to only have to buy a single seat configuration and streamline installs so they could hit production quotas.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/10/16283330/tesla-hurricane-...
It's either so close that you're overpaying for the 100kWH, or it's not very close in which case you're overpaying for the 50kWH.
Either way: the 50kWH is hit: carrying dead weight on a smaller capacity. A not insignificant weight.
The compromise that minimizes production costs and still allows that upsell is to put them in every car and disable them via software.
Whether it ends up being wasteful is complicated, there are would be operating effeciencies in putting the same hardware into every car.
Why? The component is already in every vehicle. This is not like binning for chips: every vehicle must (and does) have the capability because it’s unknown whether a consumer will pay for the upgrade. If anything, the price should go down because software costs have decreased by removing the software locks.
Base price: $10,000. Cost to produce (including profit): $11,000. Cost of option: $2000. 51% of buyers opt for the option at purchase. Some % of resales result in additional sales of the option.
Instead if, for example, the component adds $30 to the BOM and they know from market research that 10% of buyers will pay $500 for the software unlock within 3 months of purchase, they don't have to include the cost in the base price and still make very good margin on it.
Otherwise, I can totally assure you they were not "standard features", and they didn't even exist for most car models, regardless of the trim.
Or maybe your definition of "older" vehicles means those that were produced in the past 5-10 years, but that's a fairly controversial definition of "older".
Power windows were originally an expensive option, but they got cheaper, and the fraction of cars ordered with manual crank windows dwindled, to that point that power windows are simply standard on most cars now.
If somebody said, okay every car has power windows but yours don't work unless you pay a monthly fee, I'd break out the wire cutters right in the dealer lot and fix the problem myself. Screw that. It's a standard feature and someone broke it, I'm fixing it.
I understand your point. I just don’t care. They sold me a thing, and now it’s mine.
If you sell me a bunch of hardware, that hardware is now mine, and I should be able to do whatever I want with it. If you sell that hardware with a bunch of software on it, I should again be able to do anything I want with that software.
That doesn't entitle me to updates of that software, or ongoing use of the company's cloud infrastructure. It's fine to require payment for that.
IP laws just aren't particularly relevant to the discussion at hand. I don't think anyone is suggesting we should be able to legally "pirate" the software running on our devices.
If I own a shoe, I can paint it to look different or change its shoelaces. If I own a book, I can tear out the pages and rearrange them. If I own a TV, I can hook anything I want up to it. And if I own a car, I can modify it as I see fit. Those things are mine. If I no longer want them, I can sell them (barring a specific contract with the manufacturer, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine). And if a company wants me to pay them money while still retaining some kind of legal right to restrict how I use it, they can negotiate a discounted price for me to pay them.
When I walk onto a car lot, I'm not saying "whoa, check out this IP!" The salesperson doesn't hype me up by saying "you could own significant portions of this beauty today!" We don't sign a "purchase (most of it) contract". I don't pay "sales-but-all-rights-reserved" tax on it. The DMV lists me as the owner, not the IP licensee.
If I had to choose whether to support laws protecting IP versus laws protecting ownership, I'll pick ownership 100% of the time.
Having said that, I don't entirely understand why Tesla don't keep the software unloaded from the vehicles until the user chooses to purchase the add-on features: compared to everything else the software does, that's not exactly a particularly difficult engineering challenge.
I run a news website. I charge $2 to view the news website. You paid to view to my news website, thanks!!
Let’s say you really prefer dark mode, but my news website is bright white. You install something like DarkReader, to make it inverted colors, so problem solved!
But now I realize that this is a market that I could charge for. So I start charging $5 for “news site with dark mode”.
Should it be illegal for you to use dark reader to view my news website with your light-mode-only license?
Technically I’ve shipped you the text and style for my website, which you are completely allowed to access and have paid for.. Then you’ve modified it for your own use after receiving the product. Is that wrong?
I'm fine paying for software. And I'm fine with a subscription model if I actually get new things periodically during my subscription.
Put another way, if you sell me a static, unchanging piece of software (like a software update to enable heated seats), then that should be a one-time charge. If you sell me a self-driving package that gets regular updates over time, then I'm fine with a subscription.
(Self-driving software is a bit of a grey area, though. I should probably have to pay for new features, like "now it can drive on some more roads where it would previously disengage and require a human to handle it". But I should not have to pay for an update that fixes safety issues with existing functionality.)
“I want free updates”
Self-Driving is much more complex and abides much more as an argument to your view.
(personally I'm very much on the side of giving people control of their own software and hardware)
If the hardware requires non-trivial software to enable the feature, and that software is not provided with the device, then it's fair to require additional payment to buy that software. But also no one should be able to prevent a third party from reverse engineering the hardware and writing their own software for it.
I think "who gets to decide?" is a somewhat silly question. It's the same answer we'd accept for just about any situation: someone reasonably well-versed in the technology.
It's of course hard to prove as cause, but if there is a liability case it might become "interesting"
Edit: Also relevant: even without incident, the disabled heated chairs may be broken. By not being enabled Tesla doesn't have to repair them under warranty as the aren't a feature. Thus they maybe can reduce quality in the production
I imagine the situation at court "you implemented combustive seat-heating for this model?¿"
I disagree, pretty strongly. There is a line. They sold you something in its entirety, including the seats with wires.
I would agree with you if you had to download the control software from their servers.
I would agree with you if you if the upgrade provided you physical wires to install, even if you had to install them.
Related I think it would be fine to purchase the control software and/or heating wires from a third party that was not tesla and install it in your tesla car.
When it comes to hardware, if they've already installed the feature, they've already factored the cost of it into the purchase price. Your out the door cost includes that heated seat hardware, even if it's not a line item. And you don't have the option to have it removed for a discount (or get a lower car package). You only have the option to pay to use the thing that's already in your car or not to pay to use it.
Trying to think about it in terms of "normal" cars - unlocking Plaid is similar to reprogramming the ECU on an ICE to deliver more power.
There is also law in place to refute what you said. Manufacturers can not deny warranty coverage if you jailbreak your phone or hot rod your car, and this is similar. (I believe they have the burden of proof if it seems you did the damage)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
If the manufacturer can show the change contributed to the failure, they can deny coverage. Vastly increasing the power output of the drivetrain would likely cause a voided warranty on the drivetrain.
Unlocking heated seats wouldn’t void the warranty on the drivetrain, but could void it on the seats and related electronics.
> They sold you something in its entirety, including the seats with wires.
This is the part I have to agree with. There should be nothing to legally prevent me from doing whatever I want with my hardware. It may be unethical to use this hardware without paying for it, but I shouldn't be legally prevented from doing it. They did sell me this hardware even if the cost was paid for by those buying the heated seat package and I should be able to do whatever I want with it.
I think this works quite well with things like CPUs where they blow hardware fuses to disable features and it is infeasible to restore this functionality at any practical scale. However for things like seat warmers where the controller is likely easy to bypass (and in this case the lock is actually implemented very far away in the infotainment system) it will likely turn into a arms race between tamper-resistant hardware and those who what to unlock the feature without paying for it.
What if it's a sort of payment plan?
E.g. if we assume heated seats costs $1000 and the consumer wants to pay for this monthly over ten years then it'll be 1000/12/10=$8.33 plus interest per month.
Of course, this should mean that once repaid, it's the property of the owner and therefore transferred at resale.
Hardware features that are actually present in the product when purchased should be available for use. If manufacturers want to put those features behind a software lockout, I guess that's their prerogative, but they shouldn't be allowed to complain or punish the customer if they find a way to circumvent it.
Charging for ongoing services that require the manufacturer to spend money to maintain infrastructure (like a remote engine start or remote lock/unlock) seems entirely fair, though.
But as a big fat asterisk to that last statement, it pisses me off that I can't run my own server infra for that myself. I bought a Mercedes E-class a little over a year ago, and it included a free year of their online services. Fortunately continuing the subscription is pretty cheap (something like $150/year). But it's an all-or-nothing deal. I want to be able to do remote lock/unlock and engine start, but I don't want Mercedes tracking my location wherever I go, and I don't care about map updates (since I use Google Maps via Android Auto for navigation).
I would much rather be able to spin up my own server to handle some of the remote capabilities, and not have the car talk to Mercedes' infra at all (except perhaps for software updates, which I would manually approve/accept).
I get why car makers won't do this. Even if they didn't want a stranglehold over providing services, I'm sure they still wouldn't do it: it would require extra "advanced" settings in the car and in the app to allow the customer to set an alternate server backend. And customers will inevitably make security mistakes with their own server backend, which could create liability for the carmaker, or at least cause bad press, even if it shouldn't.
Umm, I think this is more like "airlines vs passengers" when passengers read about "hidden city ticketing" in a travel blog, think it sounds cool yet haven't properly understand it, yet decide to go to town on it anyway.[0]
Since most providers are entirely at liberty to tell a customer they're no longer welcome, as a customer you have to be really really sure you want to own up to the provider as being an adversary, since you might end up needing another provider. For ever.
(Full disclosure: have been looking for, booking, and flying on less-than-entirely-legitimate airfares for a looong time. Have occasionally broken out in a cold sweat at an airport in some far-flung country on a dodgy itinerary when I think I've been rumbled...)
[0] https://www.insider.com/skiplagging-american-airlines-banned...
Granted I may not be in the demographic for a telsa, i wouldn't ever want my car connected to the internet.
It's not illegal, but it is against the airline's T&Cs ... which you have to agree to when you purchase a ticket.
Ref: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/steering-failures-are-t...
Apparently it's a software problem.
https://www.axios.com/2023/08/03/hyundai-kia-recall-fire-ris...
Good on the hackers. Good on everyone who helps to liberate us from the overreach of big business.
I make a video game and charge $50 for it. Later I make a DLC and charge $25 for it.
Is your claim that if I keep them as separate purchasable downloads, I'm not rent seeking?
But if instead combine the game and dlc into a single executable (to simplify build and distribution) and put the dlc behind a software lock, somehow that is now rent seeking/overreach and I deserve to have hackers unlock it for everyone for free?
But if there was a single-player or LAN version of the game (I know that's not really possible with something like WoW, but for the sake of the argument...), then players should absolutely not have to pay an on-going subscription fee to play that way.
If the content is on the disc or shipped as part of the files of the base game, then it should be accessible without additional purchase. Otherwise, you're undercharging for the original deliverable, and overcharging for the actual "downloadable content".
Imagine this taken to the logical extreme. I sell you a printer. It comes with an amount of ink. However, I've decided that instead of allowing all of the ink to be used, I will limit the printer to only give you X number of pages per cartridge, regardless of actual ink content. Buuuuut, you can also pay me $5 for the "ability" to use all of the ink in your cartridges instead of only part of it. Would it be wrong for hackers to unlock my printers to use all of the ink without having to pay a subscription fee?
If I buy a car, then, yes, "my hardware my choice". Software should be no different.
I personally think end user license agreements are immoral. If you want to attach conditions to use, you should have to spend the time to work out a proper contract, executed by both parties, with consideration provided on both sides.
But I still think that's weird. To use your "commercial use" example, if I buy a lawnmower, the company that sells it to me should not be able to dictate that I can only use it for personal use, on my own lawn. If I want to use it to mow my neighbors' lawns and charge them for it, they can't stop me.
Copyright licenses like the GPL are interesting. I've released software under the GPL in the past (though these days I usually choose more permissive licenses like Apache or MIT). The GPL itself is essentially a hack that rides on our current awful copyright law in order to creatively subvert it. If our copyright laws were more reasonable and more aimed toward benefiting the public commons, we may not even have a need for the GPL; it's even possible that big parts of it would be unenforceable in a more reasonable copyright regime.
Just a note on this:
> If you agree not to use the software for commercial purposes when you purchase it, you can't morally decide "my bytes my choice" and just to use it for commercial purposes anyway
While this may be true under current law, there's nothing inherent in the universe that makes it this way. We as a society have decided that, legally, some things are out of bounds when it comes to contractual obligations. As an extreme example, you can't contractually sign yourself into slavery. No court (in the US and quite a few other places, at least) would consider that contract valid. The idea that you can sign away your rights to use a piece of software commercially is not some absolute moral good. We could decide as a society that this sort of thing isn't ok, and enshrine it into law.
And what's the "moral perspective" in question? Is it just "whatever benefits the consumer"?
This is called price discrimination and it’s a great thing. You’re talking about under/over charging but that’s absurd: there is no such thing. People pay what something is worth to them.
What you’re advocating for creates actual economic inefficiencies: the people who don’t want the DLC must either pay a higher price, or not make the purchase at all, and the people who would happily pay for the additional DLC now get a net cheaper price, despite a willingness to pay more.
I personally do not like services that exhibit rent-seeking behavior, but what, precisely, is IMMORAL about the practice?
If the game had a base cost of 0 and a monthly price to play it it would be acceptable. Quake Live worked like this and I believe Game Pass.
Suppose netflix added a $10 upfront cost for subscriptions to combat people churning subscriptions or whatever. Would that make it justified to download all the shows they let you?
>Also you should know that the download function is limited to 100 titles.
I shouldn't know, because I don't subscribe to netflix :^)
Obviously it does not: your downloads expire after a certain amount of time, and if you cancel your subscription, you won't be able to get a key to decrypt the files.
Companies are free to try to put restrictions on that sort of thing, but I think if customers are able to circumvent those restrictions (the DMCA anti-circumvention laws notwithstanding), the company should not get to complain about this.
the only difference between now and 2017 is people saw EA raking in the money anyway and have followed suit, so it's now more common. the outrage was proved toothless... cause star wars sells, and so does te$la.
Presumably you've made the choice to bundle the base game and the DLC together like that in order to reduce your costs somehow, and I'm not responsible for your business model or logistical issues. If you're worried about people unlocking the DLC for free, don't put it in their hands without charging them for it.
Either way, I think it's entirely reasonable to classify the concept of "charging extra at a later date for something you've already given the customer" as rent-seeking or overreach. Even more so if, instead of a one-time charge, you choose to charge a subscription for something that does not require any ongoing costs for you to provide.
You make a common argument that's deceptively anti-consumer.
Yes, this can be abused - but that's a different argument.
Imagine that 1/2 of the owners want heated seats. It is more cost effective to just install the hardware in every car rather than creating a new production line. These owners now need to pay 2x the raw cost of installing the seats (because they need to cover the cost of installing the hardware in the car that won't purchase it) in order to cover the cost (and of course there is some profit margin on top). But this can still be much cheaper than the extra overhead of setting up a second production line. But in this model the price of the car that didn't pay for the seats hasn't changed. The cost increase is covered by those who do pay for the seats. Making two separate production lines would raise the cost (of both models) for no benefit. Adding the feature to all cars would necessitate raising the price for the base (and only) model to cover the additional manufacturing cost.
(Ok, money is fungible so it is a little hard to say anything for certain, but in theory it is rational and fair)
You bought a car, paid for the car, and that car has heated seats. Now they want more money for using hardware you already bought, paid for and received.
I would understand if they had recurring costs with your heated seats (like they do with eg. a music streaming service or something like that), but nope, they sold you the hardware and now are blackmailing you for more money to use something you already own.
Not adding heated seats does not mean a different production line, just one skipped step for the seats without heating, and this was done on every car before they started with this subscripton and "pay extra" crap. This would also reduce e-waste for those who do not want and/or need heated seats.
Do you really want to live in a world, where you have to pay extra to use something you already bought?
I agree that if people figure out how to easily enable those seats they have a problem. Because now they are getting less payment for those seats (as some people are using them without paying). But that doesn't make it wrong to sell you a car with non-functional heated seat hardware.
> blackmailing you
They aren't blackmailing you. There is no threat. They are making you an offer. They can turn your disabled heated seats into functioning heated seats.
Skipping a step effectively creates a different production line. Now you need to track these inventories separately, ensure stock of each, schedule the production and ensure that various stockpiles around the world have each model. There are very significant cost there. It is entirely possible that this complexity and cost results in more e-waste. But it definitely increases cost.
> where you have to pay extra to use something you already bought?
But you didn't buy it. You bought a car without heated seats. (or with disabled heated seats if you prefer). You got exactly what you were promised and what you agreed to pay for.
They should, it's called buying a different car without those features installed.
>Everyone must pay for features that only a subset of customers use?
You are already paying for those features upfront as part of buying the car - there is no recurring expense to the manufacturer. If you do not want or are unable to pay for those features, you buy a different car without them installed.
What you're arguing for is for everyone to have to pay another monthly subscription, and conflating "paying more for a car" with "paying monthly for non-consumable resources for a car".
I do agree that making this a subscription is ridiculous, especially such an expensive subscription. But I think making two models of car and raising the price for everyone is illogical.
Yes. I'm sick of concern for the value-conscious dragging down the entire market.
If I didn’t have the legal authority to do it I’d probably still do it and rather pay the damages than the ransom.
Which modern car do you think is not violating your privacy?
I wonder which schools had the children watch this after the pledge of allegiance.
I guess my point is: This will start an arms race. Eventually you'll need to pick between an on-network Tesla getting software updates from them, or an off-network Tesla with FSD and other things that unlocked can provide. Heated seats can likely be re-enabled electronically without software (i.e. splice in a switch).
Personally, purely from a utilitarian perspective, I wouldn't choose to use FSD that wasn't getting continuous updates because it may not include road changes, state law changes, and frankly still has a lot of room for safety/reliability improvement. Maybe "Enhanced Autopilot" ($6K) just for lane change.
PS - 9/10 of Tesla's recalls have been software updates. So you'd lose those with an off-network Tesla.
https://www.blackhat.com/us-23/briefings/schedule/index.html...
I wonder if Tesla will start using physical one-shot fuse bits buried deep in hard-to-access components (eg. hardwire a heater control relay open in the final programming step at the factory) to make these type of attacks more difficult. Of course that would preclude up-selling the feature later.
My brain can kind of rationalize this as "it makes the up-front price lower, and you can add features to your car without even visiting a dealer", but my heart definitely recoils at the idea of paying for something like that already in my possession.
It allows making multiple logical models with a single production line. This lowers the cost and in theory that is valuable to consumers. I imagine that if there was no ability to "upgrade" later this wouldn't even be news. Consumers would just see it as a base model and a premium model, and Tesla found a very cost effective way to provide two models of car. Or four models if you count self-driving.
But upgrading later is actually valuable. Why not let someone add features as their budget allows? It does "expose" that these are only software locks but I think that is actually fine. In theory it is just the people who purchase the premium upgrades that are paying for these features in all cars. It shouldn't necessarily affect the price of the base model and you aren't really paying for the feature unless you purchase the upgrade.
I think the hackers should have waited.
[1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/is-tesla-full-self-drivin...
Popular is the wrong word. Common, maybe. But popular?
No, the word "autonomous" should not be used in conjunction with any Tesla vehicles. That means it can drive itself with no one inside. No Tesla vehicle is anywhere near autonomous.
Wouldn't be surprised if Tesla has a defeat-device buried somewhere that allows for remote permanent deactivation once parked in case of piracy
not ed25519? I know very little about these encryption thingies. The Internet recommends ed25519 over rsa.
https://www.thedrive.com/cars-101/39941/what-is-a-buick-gran...
They tend to involve a gizmo intercepting can messages though. The gizmo is usually keyed to the serial number of the car so you can't clone/move/resell them.
WTF guys?
Plus, it seems backwards from a business standpoint. You always have the cost of installing the hardware, but now you only get a % of users who agree to pay for the additional cost? The only way to "fix" that is to artificially raise the price of the product so effectively everyone is paying, which means now you're double-dipping from the people who do want it.
It's just crap. If I buy a physical device (not renting) then I own it and should be able to use its full capabilities. The only thing that should cost more is anything that has ongoing cost to the manufacturer if I use it.
Are you referring to the legacy auto manufacturers that still can't make EVs profitably in 2023? Perhaps Ford with its negative 58.9% EBIT margin on their EV division [1]?
Of course you can "solve" a more complex supply-chain and multiple vehicle configurations. It just costs more money. And therefore reduces your profit margin. If you do too much problem-solving of this type, your margin might end up negative. Not every EV manufacturer can subsidize their EV business with a high-margin ICE business.
[1] https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2023...
You know what's better than "artificially raising the price of the product" so you can pay for the heated car seats or whatever? Raising the price of the product, and not installing the car seat in the first place and keeping the extra money for yourself. The idea that carmakers can pass the cost of software locked (ie. non-functional) parts to consumers makes zero sense.
They may also believe that there is a large-enough group of people who would decide not to get heated seats installed at purchase time, but would later regret that and wish they had it. The manufacturer might make more on "install hardware unconditionally and charge a fee for zero work later" than "install hardware later on demand".
The true cost of things to the manufacturer often depends on more than just the cost of that item and the direct labor cost to install it.
But I absolutely agree that we should applaud people who get around these sorts of software lockouts. If the company is going to give you a piece of hardware, it should be fair game for you to figure out how to get the most use out of it.
Heated front/rear seats have been standard equipment since 2020 I believe.
In November of 2021, they made heated seats standard. I think the only software unlocks available for current vehicles are acceleration boost, enhanced autopilot, and FSD.
1. https://www.tesla.com/support/upgrades#tesla-accordion-123-w...
quite prolific
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFYspCLoLTY
Frankly the sped up versions are more useful for understanding the technology because most driving is boring, even for a self-driving system. But it is good to be able to go to the raw version if needed.
We need to bring back hackers/crackers of the old and NOT share exploits with these companies.
However as many industries the car companies try to keep the infinite growth premise alive by entirely computerizing all parts and close off any innovation with patents. Just like ICs, in the future nobody will own their car and those who want that will need hundreds of billions to burn to create companies that has no chance of competition.
Technical constraints to lock out owners/users only serve to enforce a manufacturer’s feudalistic rent seeking and revenue extraction policies.
In the overall scope of driving a personal automobile cellphone use or even adjusting the car entertainment system are far more common causes of accidents and death and yet these are not locked away via technical controls despite being very easy to accomplish.
To put it in your terms: I'm happy for you to be allowed to drive a rat rod (hello, fellow old? I haven't heard that term in a looong time), but clearly a car with likely no crumple zones, air bags, antilock brakes, etc., etc. is less safe than a modern sedan.
Regardless, your point highlights the eternal fight between liberty and "safety and security." A society which tolerates little risk seeks to minimize liberty and maximize safety and security. A society which tolerates much risk seeks to maximize liberty and minimize safety and security.
To use cars as the prime example: why am I required to purchase a vehicle equipped with airbags [1]? They're expensive, bulky, decrease fuel economy, and may cause harm to a passenger if it improperly inflates. By owning a vehicle, I assume sole responsibility for the correct and proper operation of it as well as the physical well-being of any passengers. Frankly, I should be able to purchase a vehicle equipped without airbags to decrease the overall purchase price, thereby allowing me to use that money on other things.
The same argument doesn't apply to certain things like ABS, which I argue should be regulated because poor braking affects people both inside and outside the car. Airbags, on the other hand, only apply to people inside the car. By carrying any passenger in the vehicle, the owner assumes legal responsibility for their safe carriage.
[1] https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/federal-legislat...
The same reason that you can't sell food that's sweetened with lead. You can add lead to your own food if you want, just like you can drive a car without airbags.
You're also right that I can drive a car without airbags, but the point is that you can't buy a new car without airbags.
Beyond that, if we assume airbags, on average, decrease injuries and deaths, then society also has an interest in helping to ensure that. Heavily injured and dead people put more of a strain on our health care system, and the costs for that are not solely borne by the person who gets injured or dies.
Certainly there's room for disagreement on whether or not all that is worth the added per-individual cost, the regulatory cost, etc. But let's remember that there are many things that, on first glance, seem to only affect an individual, but actually ripple out and affect others as well.
no point to this, just thinking out loud
It’s only a subscription because it doesn’t make financial sense to purchase it outright for $15k up-front (with a 6% interest rate, you’d need to own the car for 102 months to pay less than paying for the FSD subscription for those 102 months, and it costs more per month in your loan than the subscription https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSjfzhdfj0FU... )
of all the things to hate about elon, tesla, and this whole concept of locking down features in a car, FSD really isn't one of them, as its just a software issue and its a totally separate package that isn't core to the operational capability of the car's components.
If a manufacturer wants to lock features behind a paywall, that is fine. However, they shouldn't be allowed to complain when consumers modify the thing they bought to get around that paywall. If Tesla really wants to make sure absolutely no one gets FSD or heated seats without paying, then they should make a point of only including the relevant hardware or software in the vehicle at the time of purchase.
If you sell me a house with a safe in it and want to charge me for the code that's fine, but if get a welder to just break the door open you have no right to tell me no.
is it reasonable for tesla to lock you out of the app or software updates if the software hash doesn't match what they provide ? would it be okay for them to void the warranty if you run software they didn't provide ?
Of course, and I don't think anyone here is arguing against that.
> would it be okay for them to void the warranty if you run software they didn't provide ?
There are laws governing this exact thing (in the US it's the Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act), and in general Tesla would have to prove your unauthorized modification caused the failure which you're claiming under warranty.
As for "they didn't pay for the license"....no....you gave it to them without asking them to sign a license agreement. They paid you money, and you gave them a product. How they use it is up to them.
(registered security researcher for my rooted Teslas)
If you sell me a book, I'm not allowed to copy that book and sell those copies. I am allowed to chop it up and and repaste my own copy however I see fit.
If I'm wrong and current copyright law does not permit this kind of thing, then current copyright law is bad and should be changed.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 (17 U.S. Code § 1201 - Circumvention of copyright protection systems)
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840... (circumvent a technological measure (3) As used in this subsection— (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.)
Copyright has zero application here unless you redistribute Tesla's code or binaries. Reverse-engineering is a legal practice (in US law, at least).
Reverse engineering to utilize software you didn't pay for and don't have a license or some other legal authority to use is unlikely to pass muster legally, versus for interoperability purposes.
https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq (Control-F "What Exceptions Does DMCA Section 1201 Have To Allow Reverse Engineering?")
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscription...
EDIT: I stand corrected. It appears there was a window of time where Tesla offered rear heated seats as an upgrade on a base trim standard range Model 3.
https://electrek.co/2020/02/15/tesla-rear-heated-seats-model...
Only for the kinds of “use” that involve the exclusive rights of the copyright owner (“use” generally does not), and even then not always, because there are exceptions to copyright.
It may fall afoul of the (terribly written, but still law) Section 1201 of the DMCA, if it's arguable that the circumvention provides access to computer software (and I think it is arguable).
I agree that this should be legal, but I'm not nearly as convinced that it is legal currently.
Recall that when CD copy protection was starting to be deployed, you could negate it with a black marker. The DMCA then made black markers illegal, because it bans "tools which may be used to circumvent copyright" as well as the "circumvention of copy protection measures". (Not that anyone tried to enforce it, but the letter of the law was pretty clear that black markers were then illegal to possess)
The DMCA should be amended or revoked to make these shenanigans no longer enforceable.
No court would ever come to the conclusion that something as mundane as black markers are illegal to possess.
The DMCA is a problem because putting copy protection on (for example) heated seats is a similar level of silliness to outlawing black markers.
That is wrong. It's legal to possess a hammer but illegal to bash someone on the head with one. It was legal to possess a black marker and arguably illegal to use it to circumvent copy protection.
That's not true and it's most definitely not a valid legal position to take in defense
Back in, I think it was bad company 2, EA delivered content on disk, but locked it behind a paywall. Then they got their wrists slapped for locking already available content behind a paywall.
Softlocking hardware that exists in the car (heated seats) behind a paywall seems to be the exact same thing, and is not legal everywhere.
Knowing Tesla, even if they can’t patch the vulnerability OTA I would be very concerned about their being able to detect the use of this bypass and remote-brick cars in response until the customer agrees to bring their car in for a hardware patch.
Edit: a now-dead reply says there is no server side functionality whatsoever for FSD. I don’t own a Tesla but find it very unlikely that FSD has not even usage telemetry in what are otherwise highly connected cars.
Sounds like it would be problem for the consumer, though clearly a solved one.
Instead, what's happening is that the current price fully reflects the cost of production, and holding the extras hostage is pure gravy.
Alternatively, if a vehicle is running software that hasn't gone through Tesla's subscription how much of the liability for any software problems will Tesla be able to transfer to the vehicle owner?
Hypothetically, if Tesla were licensing 3rd party software and that license was based on installed uses and Tesla was reporting the subscriptions for FSD (rather than sales of the vehicle), what would enabling the software open up Tesla to? Would Tesla then be able to sue the person who unlocked it for the additional licensing costs they incurred?
It only became a large issue because it was a social fad for politicians and mass-media to dogpile "evil gaming companies corrupting poor mindless children", and Rockstar in particular with the GTA series was one of the most popular targets of said social fad.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/16/tesla-recalls-362758-vehicle...
The problem here is that this is functionally similar to using an outdated version of photoshop but the consequences are vastly different.
> There are few federal laws addressing automated driving. So, Mercedes Vice President of Automated Driving George Massing tells R&T, “we will probably have to deal with each individual state.” But the company plans to accept legal liability for what the car does while Drive Pilot is engaged.
As far as I can tell there still isn’t some webpage where you can submit a claim to Mercedes-Benz for a failure of their self-driving tech…
https://www.kbb.com/car-news/mercedes-well-be-liable-for-sel...
Since they are technically right, as autopilot disengages before.
> To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed.
If Tesla actually believed that their self-driving works (which they unequivocally and demonstrably don't, as their refusal to accept liability indicates), then it would cost them virtually nothing to accept liability.
Every company that offers self-driving should accept liability to prove that they have faith in their system, and we shouldn't allow any self-driving system on the road for which this isn't the case.
Let's say there's two versions of the car. Higher spec has heated seats, lower spec doesn't. Let's say it's a $1000 price difference.
At what point below are you ticked off ?
Level 1: The higher spec car has the physical seat heaters, all the wiring, all the plugs and all the software. The lower spec car has none of that.
(I think this is how cars have always been sold, so it's "normal" and "acceptable" and nobody would complain - they paid $1000 less and got less features.)
Level 2: The lower spec car has the physical seat heater inside the seat, but none of the wiring, plugs or software to make it function. (It was cheaper for them to just build the seats with the heater in there, so they did, but it will never "work")
Level 3: The lower spec car has the physical seat heater inside the seat and some wiring, but the main loom doesn't have provision for the high current draw, so it can't work.
Level 4: The lower spec car has the physical seat heater inside the seat, all the wiring, but none of the plugs to actually connect it.
Level 5: The lower spec car has the physical seat heater inside the seat, all the wiring, all the plugs (so all the physical hardware is there), but the software to turn it on is not present / not licensed.
(Note: If you got ticked off at level 5, it's pretty much like buying a brand new MacBook and being ticked off that it can theoretically run Final Cut Pro, but you have to pay to make it work. Surely you gotta pay for software ? )
We are talking about this one. The entire thread is about this one, and none of your options even passed through the conversation.
Where do you draw the line?
Next they'll be making you pay a fee to use low gears, or a power steering fee, a radio listening license, a Bluetooth permit, a reverse allowance, power window season pass, air condition authorization.
That argument doesn't hold up. Nobody should claim they are entitled to the premium features if they only have the basic license/software.
I agree that I don't want death by a thousand subscription fees, but this isn't exactly the same situation here. BMW's offerings is. Frankly, if BMW offered it with only the one-time charge, I'd consider it similar.
This really is where I have the issue. If I have to pay for my ISP to allow me to access the internet and use my bandwidth to download it, my power bill to allow my PC to install it, use up my storage space to host the software, then I should be able to do whatever I want to/with it and you shouldn't hinder me from doing so.
If I have to pay a fee for premium, and then additional components are downloaded and installed, fair game.
I wonder if there's any law that covers such a scenario, aside from EULA allowing the software dev to do what they want as long as the user agrees.
Level 5, and this case, all I'm doing is adding the missing component. A flag or something.
Boo. Hiss.
That's like asking Intel to fix a processor you overclocked
It was abandoned due to backlash but that didn't stop Intel from doing artificial segmentation, so instead of buying a chip with "3MB" of cache and being able to unlock it to 4MB later, now you buy a chip with "3MB" of cache and 1MB of dark silicon that's permanently lasered off at the factory. I get the objections, but the alternative isn't really an improvement.
The year is 2023. The goal of Big Tech is the elimination of ownership and the rise of perpetual rental income.
I used to work for a radio shop, and it was reasonably common for us to remove the radio when customers did not want it in their new car. Some wanted to have no radio for religious reasons, some businesses wanted the absolute cheapest vehicle possible for their employees, most wanted to install their own aftermarket radio.
The manufacturer sold the hardware configured in a certain state; the same device could have been configured differently depending on price. Once the device is sold, the new owner is a petty tyrant over the state of his own property.
But if I don't own the heating "feature" (promise of a result), I don't care. I am pretty sure that the warranty indemnifies the company against the hardware actually being fit for said purpose and therefore will not guarantee a result anyway, so what do you "own" in the first place, if not the device itself?
[edit: grammar, readability]
Physical goods should be required to follow the doctrine of first sale. There should never be any possible conditions on subsequent owners. If the first owner "unlocks" a feature, it should be unlocked for every subsequent owner.
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I think we need to hold all EV companies "responsible for their shit"
So, if you buy a tesla - only tesla should be responsible for recovery from every crash and and turn in.
Thus the environmental impact due to the heavy metals and all the plastics made are sole responsible from a closed, boring lopp to hyper the link to the fact that all these materials were made by stars. X.
I think my logic is off WRT analogy, but I beleive you get the premise...
Can we find a complete model of the impact of the matters which are being affected by the musks?
(im not judging musk - I am judging actions... many of these actions suck. IIATAH?
As an industry, we sell things that make hardware more useful. That's what software is. But the software we sell* comes with legal restrictions on what the buyer* can and can't do with it. Which means that we're restricting what our customers can do with the hardware that they own. And we do all that for money. *Substitute whatever you think the right terms are for these words (licensor, licensee, borrower, tenant, serf...)
If we sold an app on a mobile-phone store, and a h4ck0rz came out with a crack that unlocked the premium features on it, we'd take measures to stifle it (patching the code, increasing the obfuscation, sending a complaint upstream of whoever was distributing it, etc.), and I don't think any of us would think we're bad guys for doing so. We're just trying to feed our families. And I doubt any of us would feel compassion for someone who said they paid for that phone, own its hardware, and can do whatever they want with it including run your paid software for free.
Tesla's sin, if any, is that they sold us hardware that's designed to work only with their software. And "their" software could include software they licensed from your company, if you work in their software supply chain.
Where is the right line between "my hardware, my rules" and "my software, my rules"?
On one hand, I like owning my software or content I purchased (talking about DRM)
On the other, people expect most things to be a "live service" in terms of updates, which isn't sustainable if you only ever get paid a small onetime fee for your software. If you make the fee large, like Modo/Photoshop did, then it acts as a financial gatekeeper to your product. Even then, I feel like it creates wrong incentives for the product, so I'm not sure it's good either.
Do they? Most people I know don't want anything to update as long as it's working. They don't want new features. They don't want new UI changes. They'll dismiss/ignore prompts to update for as long as they possibly can. In very very rare cases people want "live service". They want their GPS to give them traffic information for example, but otherwise they don't want anything but bug fixes.
Photoshop for example doesn't need to be constantly updated and a version of photoshop from 10-15 years ago would be just fine for the vast majority of people. The idea that software has to either be insanely expensive or a subscription is a false dichotomy.
If someone roots their phone or car, which they own, despite the manufacturer's best efforts to prevent this, it should be legal because they are modifying a physical object they purchased. If they teach other people to root their devices, it should be legal the same way teaching lockpicking is legal if you're just lockpicking something you own.
Nobody is asking manufacturers to stop trying to get in the way of people hacking their devices. Most people won't have the skills or desire to jailbreak anyway.
But John Deere will sue farmers who try to fix their tractors themselves, Sony will sue you for jailbreaking your PS3, etc etc. That's wrong.
Additionally, DRM generates physical waste by making it hard for people to fix things they bought. The right to repair is important.
For software, illicit redistribution is covered by copyright law, no? But the same is true: if you own a copy of software and want to hack it (e.g. mod a game you bought) why should that be illegal, provided you were able to get around the game's built-in circumventions?
There's something obscene about unlocking existing physical features with more money, but there's also our mental model of what ownership means. Imagine you buy a new fridge, and it has an extra compartment that is installed, gets cooled but you have to pay to unlock. No one could ever verify that you didn't rip it open yourself. I don't think anyone would object either.
The current monetization strategies for software favor the corporations. They can withhold service in case of no payment, and they are trying to do the same to hardware. I personally feel we should regulate this as soon as possible, otherwise things like right to repair will simply disappear.
I'd say the software equivalent to right to repair would specifically be about restrictions against inspecting/decompiling/modifying the software running on your machine.
While I also think copyright is flawed in general, restrictions against redistribution of the software seem like a separate matter - in the same way hardware right to repair doesn't mean you can set up a manufacturing line for new John Deere tractors to sell to others.
> h4ck0rz came out with a crack that unlocked the premium features on it
If someone grafts on useful features using only what you have already downloaded to my device, I think that's fair game.
Depending on how you look at it the hardware was paid for by:
1. Tesla as a "marketing" expense. They expect that the $50 of hardware will make a significant number of people pay $500 for the feature. If 1/5 people upgrade that is an expected return of $100 for that $50 marketing cost.
2. The people who purchase the heated seat upgrade. It was more cost effective to install the hardware in all cars than to set up a second production line. So if 1/5 people buy this package their effective cost is $250 ($50 * 5 cars) and $250 is Tesla's buffer + profit margin. So the people who pay for this package effectively pay for the hardware in all cars.
If you enable this feature for all users both of these no longer exist. So the effective cost goes up which would likely raise the price. (Yes, I know that cost and price aren't directly related).
Freedom fighters.
"Hacking" carries quite a lot of negative connotations in most realms. These are people making sure you are able to make full use of your own stuff. There shouldn't be anything contentious about that.
No, we're keeping the word "hacker".
People have always been able to do this with a wrench since before the invention of cars.
This is a multi-million dollar industry in the USA.
You'd still need Tesla's signing key to rewrite the Autopilot software or mess up some more important components.
Now, the CID is still coordinating some parts of it - but AFAIK the car works also without that, to the point that you can simply reboot the infotainment system without losing control of the vehicle / Autopilot