What’s strange is that it’s just a PCB. It should not be an issue for them to stock or quick-build a circuit board. They can’t possibly still blame the chip-shortage bogeyman.
While you could also argue that they make things complex for themselves by having these rolling updates rather than using a Model Year system...
Elon, as is well known, is FANATICAL about the quarterly numbers. Burn the midnight oil to pump up the deliveries, etc., etc.
The thing with that, every part that's on a shelf waiting to be sold for warranty or accident repair is a part that can't go on a new car and boost the numbers. Wall Street doesn't give a shit what your parts market numbers look like, it's "How many Teslas did you build this quarter?" so there's a lot less incentive to fully stock that market - Tesla already has the sale booked and the money in their balance book.
Tesla sold about 100,000 Model 3/Ys to Hertz for rental in 2021.
Hertz rented a ton of EVs to people who were only used to the acceleration curve of ICE cars.
A ton of those people unexpectedly crashed those cars [1].
This clogged up Tesla's repair channels and blew out the timeline for everyone else.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/18/business/why-do-people-ke...
Maybe, but I am not as sure. I've not ridden in a private 3, but in a Y and S, and I had a Hertz Model 3 for a week.
I don't know if there was a firmware difference or such, or just my individual model, but the acceleration on it was garbage. I'd stop, put my foot all the way to the floor, and wait half a second or more for ANY movement, and when it did move, it accelerated like my girlfriend's A4, if not slower.
(Or, perhaps, things happened as you described, and as a result, they nerfed the acceleration - this was last year).
There was some magazine that once did this with a Honda motorcycle and the total cost for parts was 6x what the bike would cost when new.