If they want to *lease* the vehicles, that's fine. They need to make it explicitly known it is a lease for X term, and at Y cost per month of the lease. Modifying their property would be completely in the clear, or at least a hell of a lot less ethically ambiguous.

But they're selling these vehicles. As in, transfer of title to the person they're selling to. Taxes are paid. Transfer is registered with the state(s). Insurance is purchased on vehicles in your possession. And full coverage is required for vehicle loans (another set of showing proper legal transfer).

And, just because some click-wrap software has "We are allowed to murder your family and eat your children" does not make illegal clauses legal. And given in this instance, it was tesla->first owner->second owner->third owner , any click-wrap garbage would have been done by the first owner.

Basically, this is the end-run around physical ownership for all the IoT companies and companies that pay for/demand 100% connectivity. All of these companies that have these always-on remote tie ins are the Darth Vader here - "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."

All the EV companies are doing this. I so want to buy an EV. I'm not willing to subvert my ownership rights for that.

All cars are doing this stuff, it isn’t EV specific

It wouldn't matter even if they did. In the US we title large pieces of property so that people don't pull this kind of BS.

Contracts and DRM are two sides of the same coin when it comes to chipping away at ownership. They want to segment the market as finely as possible, to capture all of the excess value of their product.

E.g. they don't want to sell you a general-purpose GPU, but a GPU that's good for one purpose only, and you have to pay extra to use it for anything else [1]. Tesla is leading the way [2], but I'm sure other automakers are also trying to come up with ways to restrict "personal" vehicles from being used for "commercial" activities.

[1] Nvidia’s updates EULA to ban the use of gamer-oriented GPUs in data centers - https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidia-bans-consumer...

[2] Don’t plan on using your autonomous Tesla to earn money with Uber or Lyft - https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/10/dont-plan-on-using-an-a...

I have always suspected that nvidia's closed source drivers are an intentional result of hiding poorly-implemented limitations (see code 43 error, etc.) for the sake of market segmentation between data-center and gaming models. They would be screwed if data centers realized they could just reuse cheap off-the-shelf components for a fraction of the price.

Not to mention they benefit from building up a proprietary ecosystem (CUDA, etc.) from collecting data from users (geforce now, etc.).

It's something of a conspiracy theory.

Do you think CUDA development would be completely sustained by the profit margins of consumer cards (that would then be shared between the CUDA and gpu research teams)?