People can already modify their car hardware in dangerous ways, yet no one is welding the hood shut. You may weld spikes on your car to keep prying eyes away if you wish, but when you inevitably impale someone, Ford will not be liable.
Why should software be treated differently? All Tesla has to do to avoid liability is to say "The vehicle was running firmware with aftermarket firmware installed by the owner". They won't even need to run diagnostics, they can simply look at the logs they collect.
It's a bit like when people used to modding their own hardware tools encounter a GPU or a RAM card that won't fit into a PCI slot, so they "cut it to fit", and then are surprised it doesn't work.
When you modify a car physically with spikes or to make more engine noise, or to have looser suspension you are dealing with isolated newtonian environments.
When you tweak software that involves massive machine learned models, you can cause absolutely unpredictable horrific consequences. There are good reasons to restrict this.
Because it will be obvious that it was modified, even to journalists, the public and a jury of your peers. Also the cops, who will arrest you for it.
But there is no such visibility for software.
> But there is no such visibility for software
Software modification has a lot of visibility, especially since Teslas log everything - why not log when new firmware was loaded? They could also checksum post-facto, but even that is not necessary: Tesla could implement something similar to Androids "fastboot oem unlock" option
What I mean by visibility is that you can't fudge it, that reality is plainly visible to all actors.
Income is not visible directly (although what one's house looks like for example is visible and is a good indication of income). If you meet a well-dressed guy in a Starbucks, you have no idea whether he's crippled with debt or whether he has so much money he doesn't know what to do with. And that's true regardless of the fact that income is regulated by the government, that banks keep records and all that.
Software is NOT visible in that sense: whether your microwave is running code that will make it explode when you type in 9999 or not, is not something that can be known by everyone but the first person who has access to the device, let alone the public who couldn't understand how to compare two hashes anyway.
As far as any third party is concerned, Tesla could just be faking logs and no one would know. Actually, you may not see it still, so imagine that say, GM, suddenly releases an autonomous car and it crashes. Do you trust them when they tell you that the logs say the driver was at fault?
Cars are already extremely risky to modify, but it is still possible (and it's even a protected consumer right). I can go out and accidentally cut the breaks on my own car while changing the tire, if it causes harm, we already have a system in place to deal with it.
Why should software be any different?
I don't think that is the same for self-driving software if you were allowed to hack it. It is easy to test if your brakes work, I think it may be harder to test modified software with the huge number of interactions it must deal with.
Tough. We have liability law to cover that.
You'll be screaming to allow modification when your trip is 20 minutes longer because a bunch of rich assholes paid Tesla to route all traffic around their neighborhood.
There is also the entire liability and planed obsolescent issues not being dealt with. Will Tesla support these cars forever? Will 10 year old models still get software updates?