The batteries are backed by a warranty, which in turn is part of the cost of the car. It makes perfect sense to derate the batteries in order to lower warranty costs. Of course, we can debate whether the consumer ever saw the benefit of those lower warranty costs, but the core idea is sound enough.

As for "legal title," you have "legal title" to whatever the sales contract promised. If access to full battery capacity at the expense of service life wasn't in the contract, then you're not entitled to it.

That's definitely not how physical property works.

I mean, there are implicit guarantees that don't have to appear in the sales contract, such as the requirement that the car will meet the applicable pollution-control regulations and won't actively try to kill me, but that's obvious enough. Did you have something else in mind, particularly vis-a-vis the batteries?

You own the car. You own the battery. No sales contract changes that fact of ownership. They delivered a 75kwh battery into your possession. Since it's your battery, you should be able to use your battery however you want without having to pay Tesla. People are rightfully upset by a PR move that proves that the manufacturer is treating a car that was sold and delivered as if it still belongs to the manufacturer.

You bought a 60 kWh car. If it performs as advertised, you not entitled for more, no matter what hardware is inside. And if you find a way to exploit the full capacity of the battery, you can, it's yours, but don't count on Tesla to support it.

I have no problem with market segmentation. It allows more people to have access to a product while protecting the margins of the manufacturer. Because, without margins, there is no product.

And in fact, I am happy when I am traveling and the student next to me paid half of what I paid, I could afford the higher price ticket in exchange for more convenience, so no problem for me, but if the student had to pay the same price as I did, he wouldn't have been able to travel at all. I was like him years ago, and our children will probably be too.

It’s the same thing with spinning hard drives and SSDs. The reported capacity is almost always lower than the actual capacity. That allows dead blocks to be “replaced” without the user even knowing (“remapped sectors”). Could you imagine the PR disaster if your SSD lost visible capacity as time went on?

You do have a point about the weight. The cost of shipping an SSD with 0% overprovisioning and one with 25% is negligible; the ICs weigh just a few grams. However, a car that has to haul an extra 15 kWh of unusable capacity does use extra energy. I’d be curious how much is needed to haul those extra cells.

I understand in case of Tesla you don't like the idea of hauling those extra unused cells around. But you are buying a car model with a specific mass, acceleration and range. It makes no difference whether how exactly the producer fit into those parameters.