I've seen lots of articles about different cases, but this one is dominating the Google rankings right now:

https://jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-featur...

The car was bought from Tesla, but the features was disabled AFTER the sale, and indeed, after a resale had been agreed to. So it's not quite with no involvement from Tesla here, but I've seen ones in completely private resales too; just can't find them right now.

I would returned the car to their dealer... through the window.

Edit: Autopilot didn't engage, that's weird...

Tesla's reasoning for disabling FSD on some of their buyback cars is so they can sell it for a lower price and give the user the option to one-click purchase FSD in the future without needing a service appointment.

For the private sell situation, this is close to what you might be thinking of[0]. Supposedly the story is: Tesla bought a car back, however then sold it to an auction house and enabled FSD as a "demo". The auction house mistakenly listed the features as being enabled, and when the car sold Tesla never disabled the FSD demo. When the user then privately sold the car to a new owner, the new owner performed the ownership transfer, however either a human or some automated system saw that the FSD demo was enabled and disabled it.

0: https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-disables-autopilot-on-...

I think you'll find that nobody can provide a source for that scenario... because it never happened.

The closest thing you'll find is that Tesla sold a used trade-in that originally had Autopilot. The car was not advertised to have Autopilot in the used listing, which is kind of a key point that people "forget" when citing the case. Tesla apparently semi-frequently disable features in trade-ins and resell the trade-in as a lower-spec car (for less money).

Tesla made the mistake of not disabling autopilot before delivering the car to the second owner, who believed they hit the lottery and got free autopilot. Recall that the car was sold used as a non-autopilot car. Tesla later corrected the mistake, and it generated a shit-storm.

I agree it's creepy that they can turn off features of a car that has left the factory, but they don't routinely do it for features that people has paid for.

The story is a little bit different, since it involved a third-party sale. A CAR DEALERSHIP sold a Tesla car with autopilot advertised to the end buyer. It was disabled by Tesla who had sold it to the dealership apparently without that advertising (the dealership presumably checked the car over, and sold it in the state it was in; not an unreasonable thing to do). But that's besides the point. No one is arguing your Tesla overlords are unkind right now.

The difference between a license/lease and ownership is who has that power.

Yahoo was an awesome company for the first few years. Companies change. Amazon and Google are not exactly in an upwards trajectory right now either, although for many years, they could do no wrong.

I 100% believe Tesla will treat its owners well while it's in the exponential growth startup phase, and doing well. It's counting on word-of-mouth for continued growth. If I buy a car which I have licensed from Tesla, I'm hedging on that continuing. Once growth stops, companies enter the phase where they start to milk existing customers. If a company runs into financial problems, it enters a phase where it needs to exploit existing customers.

That's for one person. If we all buy a car from Tesla, we're all giving up power as consumers for the long haul.

https://www.autoblog.com/2020/03/23/tesla-removing-content-f... - This article lists two cases.

Yes. I recall reading about a man who sold his car with Autopilot activated, and when Tesla got wind of the sale, they deactivated Autopilot on the new owner.