Is your Tesla covered by DMCA? IANAL but I don't think so.

This clause is talking about DRM, which I am fairly certain is about the duplication/distribution of copyrighted content, which is not what you're doing if you bypass protections on your Tesla.

John Deere has vigorously asserted that the software in their tractors is copyrighted, and anyone who modifies them is violating the DMCA: https://boingboing.net/2017/04/22/drm-eschatology.html https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-05/farmers-f...

The DMCA has been held to apply to physical hardware in the past. Until 2015 it was ambiguous whether you even had a right to hack your own motor vehicle if encryption was used to secure its firmware, since that would normally be a violation. We didn't get the right to have third parties (i.e. repair shops, professionals) do it until 2018. https://hackaday.com/2018/10/26/dmca-review-big-win-for-righ...

Tesla could probably try to argue that the DMCA applies to parts of their firmware, since as far as I'm aware it still holds for some parts of other vehicles.

The software that runs on the car, without which the car cannot function, is copyrighted.

Right, and the point of DMCA is to prevent the duplication of copyrighted content.

So as long as you don't duplicate their firmware, the grounds to not have you modify it are very questionable.