> For Vehicles other than Roadster, you may opt‐out from our automatic collection of Telematics Log Data by sending a written request to Tesla or by adjusting the privacy settings through the touchscreen of your Vehicle, if such functionality is available and has been enabled on your Vehicle. If you opt‐out from collection of such Vehicle data, please note that we will not notify you of issues applicable to your Vehicle in real‐time and this may result in your Vehicle suffering from reduced functionality, serious damage or inoperability.
> You may also opt‐out from transmission of any data between your Vehicle and Tesla as follows: (a) for Roadster, by switching off the modem in your Vehicle, or (b) for other Vehicles, by sending a written request to Tesla pursuant to Section 11. If you exercise this opt‐out, please note that we will be unable to notify you of issues applicable to your Vehicle in real‐time and this may result in your Vehicle suffering from reduced functionality, serious damage or inoperability and it may also disable many features of your Vehicle, including periodic software and firmware updates, remote services, interactivity with mobile applications, and in‐car features such as navigation and location search, Internet radio, voice commands and web browser functionality.
Alternatively, you can remain fully plugged into their cloud services, get all the latest software updates, and that could come with new notifications in the UI that third-party modifications have been detected which could damage the vehicle.
I think a better comparison would be a locked bootloader with remote access built in (and phones are already this way more or less)
It's more as if you bought a laptop, and in order to overclock it, you had to void the warranty. (which is, of course, entirely the case for almost every laptop on the market).
Overclocking can cause harm (worse battery life, excessive heat). That potential for harm is a plausible reason to void the warranty.
Tesla is just voiding the warranty as a punishment for opting out of their software-gated features. Those features aren't harmful to activate.
How is that different from increasing the maximum acceleration of a car? Worse battery life and excessive heat. It is entirely possible that people think Tesla is greedy instead of Tesla choosing one trade off at the expense of another in software.
Tesla's more expensive models often share the same battery and motor but they tend to push the hardware closer to its limits which also results in higher wear and tear. High performance cars usually need more frequent maintenance. It is entirely possible that warranty on the cheaper model is longer than on the higher end model and by installing the upgrade Tesla can no longer guarantee that longer warranty or any warranty at all.
Is it only possible or is it a fact? If it is only possible and not a fact then it is a fact that warranties are the same.
If I buy an abandoned house full of booby traps, or some property contaminated by toxic waste, or a wrecked car, I probably won't be able to use it "for what it's for" as is.
These things are still "mine" in two senses:
1. a property rights sense — nobody can just cart them away! That would be theft!
2. the sense that I have the legal right to do whatever I want to them in the process of fixing them up. I can take a wrecking ball to the house and build a new house. I can take apart the car and replace parts of it. Nobody has a legal right to stop me from doing these things.
But nobody's obligated to help me do that fixing-up, or to give me the money to do it. It's my responsibility, if I want the thing to work. For these sorts of items, you go into the purchase knowing that the purchase itself is only the start of what you'll have to pay to get a working product out the other end.
If Tesla is guilty of anything, it's false advertising: implying that they're selling you a car, when they're actually selling you a willfully-misbehaving robot that would have to be modified to turn it into a car.
But make no mistake — you own that willfully-misbehaving robot. Just like you own the wreck, or the waste dump.
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Given an entirely autonomous robot (like a self-driving car), though, there is an interesting edge-case, which (thankfully) has not come up yet in the real world: the product you "own" might be programmed to get up and leave on its own.
You have, as the owner, the legal right to stop it from leaving. You might even have a legal right to demand the robot's release and return, if someone else picked it up. (Weird pet-ownership and/or slavery vibes from this sentence.)
That, however, might conflict with another consideration. E.g., if Tesla or another autonomous-robot company gets slapped with a government-mandated recall notice, they might be legally obligated to summon your car back to their factory, at least for repair.
The edge case — the part current case-law doesn't yet cover — is the following: if you've disabled their ability to do that, and then your car later explodes because it didn't receive the mandated servicing... are you liable, because you disabled the recall summons? Even if the government never explicitly mandated you to stop using the car and send it over to them?
In fact the most likely case in which that would be necessary is if it had been stolen