* Illegal to replace your own brake rotors or pads, as faulty ones can cause safety issues.
* Illegal to replace your own headlights, as bad ones could be too dim or too bright and cause safety issues.
* Illegal to change your own oil, as bad ones could seize up your engine in the middle of the road and cause safety issues.
* Illegal to install a turbocharger, as that makes your car accelerate faster than the manufacturer likes and could cause safety issues.
The end result of this line of thinking leads to a million dollar tractor that a farmer can't fix when they need it most. I much prefer the idea that people are individually responsible for any modifications they choose to make to their cars.
At some point, I assume modifying drive-by-wire systems will become legally restricted.
https://www.autocare.org/government-relations/current-issues...
You can install your own brake pads sure, but as a layman if you installed brake pads of your own design and construction, it might be a bit of an issue.
You can modify your car to your heart's desire and put it in a garage or drive it on a race track. You just cannot go into a public road with them. Totally sensible.
It's like preventing customers from changing their own tires because "they might do it wrong and cause an accident". Yeah, they might. But it's not the car manufacturer's responsibility to prevent that, and it certainly isn't justification for locking down the car to only be drivable with manufacturer-installed tires, or remotely disabling cars that use tires from unapproved brands.
Imagine someone installs a cheap third-party ADAS in a Tesla that causes a multi-car pile-up. Should we expect highway patrol officers be able to determine if some third-party software interfered with the normal operation of the car? And, even if Tesla Inc is legally in the clear because the customer did it, they are the #1 target for bad news headlines because they're 'the Apple of Cars' (at least in terms of how much hype they attract), so by the time they set the record straight they've already lost some good-will.
Li-ion batteries have a huge environmental cost. To hide ⅓ of that material behind software is immoral (imho).
It sounds like they were swapping in a better part because they may have not had the original. In the past that was a “win” for the customer. It seems like Tesla has turned this into a loss for the customer (more weight on the vehicle) and a loss for humanity (70 tons of earth mined for unused lithium).
However, the software that artificially controls how much range the battery pack will produce (outside of the charging & self-protection algos) - that's borderline unethical to DRM.
The car is a 90 (effectively) because Tesla set it up that way.
Now I kind of want to see what Shelby would do.