Featured Tesla Yanks Features After Sale

I read that article too.

The terrible part was that the guy whose car suddenly lost the features actually called up Tesla and asked if some software features could be removed from a hypothetical used Tesla in the interests of knocking the price down a little. Company rep said they couldn't/wouldn't do it, even after they had done exactly that to his car!

I'm not ready to take a side because I see benefits to it either way- as long as the policy is consistently applied. Tesla goofed pretty hard with this one. Tesla owners have the right to expect reasonable resale value for their cars including optional features that they've paid for.

 

Me either, not enough information

Let it play out

 

I just hope they didn’t remove it while he was snoozing behind the wheel

 

Meanwhile all the board of directors for all the other auto makers are asking: Why in the world were we totally blindsided and haven't even thought of over the air updates for $8K a piece that can be wiped and resold to second owners?

I bet the days of underestimating what Tesla is doing to the future of the auto sales are no longer being made light of...

 

I won't take sides either, but we all kind of knew that OTA-anything is a two-way street ...

 

Tesla is going to destroy their used car sales and piss off their customers. The car was sold at auction by Tesla promoting the features, dealer bought and sold the vehicle promoting the features. The car had the features that were fully paid for by the previous owner, Tesla is going to lose a lot of customer support and promotion by double dipping the features that are paid for and customers can't promote in selling the vehicle.

 

Yep... And if your claim to fame was building the first popular online secure payment service before you were in the car making business you're light years ahead of the auto-industry's transition to OTA-anything.

Supposedly that's precisely one of the biggest set backs VW has had in the rapid transition to all electric vehicles.

 

tesla is a tech company, maybe they've beed studying apple/samsung/facebook/etc.

 

Sonos is probably a better example.

 

As I said many times... Tech companies sell unfinished products and refine and improve the product over time. Whereas the auto industry builds a completely finished product that will never change unless there's an emergency safety recall/repair/upgrade.

So it was easier to say Tesla sucked when they first started producing their cars. But after a decade, almost every Tesla on the road today is running the latest most updated software.

 

Makes me not want to buy the Full Self Driving with a new Tesla. Musk had mentioned that it would be an appreciating asset. If I sell it or trade it, that asset could be turned off, and it would be useless to the next owner, and would not add to the trade in price for me. More like a negative asset.

 

I can't find the link just now, but one of the older luxobarge builders (Audi I think?) was developing a system for renting features. The car would have all the hardware onboard, but not everything would be accessible until it was unlocked by a crypto code. Some people would choose to rent Feature X 24x7, others would only pick it up for a vacation trip two weeks in August.

I'd feel a lot more comfortable with that kind of arrangement though to be honest I don't really want to drive around in a jukebox shaking me down for quarters every few minutes.

 

We are already seeing the signs of the incoming generations of consumers being interested in paying for accessing different experiences on demand rather than owning the same stuff permanently. I wouldn't be surprised if car ownership were eventually replaced with a subscription to a baseline "mobility service", with the exact car specs being accessed through a pay to play plan/apps of some kind.

 

If I read this right on the article update, the "recall" happened while the original auction purchaser used the car and was then in the process of selling it to the current owner. So, possibly, the auction purchaser bought the features, but they weren't sold to the latest purchaser in Tesla's thinking.

 

Yep - ambivalent towards both sides, think MS windows products & their OTA updates. Having perfect backups of all things PC has allowed us to NOT have to remain a product of the Microsoft crash test dummy Fleet. There are a handful of folks smart enough to be able to remove updates & restore (better?) preferred ones from their archived experience. Some of them post their findings online - for the benefit of risk-taking tinkerers. Using modified &/or older code is like skydiving ... enjoyable - thrilling - sometimes tragic.

 

Another facet of the quantum era, where the shareholder and the customer each want it both ways all the time, and the CEO can't say no to either of them.

 

I was thinking it got turned on by mistake. Tesla was selling it at auction because the original owner had lemoned it. So it has been in and out of a service center multiple times trying to fix an issue.

 

Or maybe it's because a dealer was involved in the re-sale and Tesla wanted to make sure the dealer had an unhappy buyer and was sweating the legal liability of costing $8K in harm to person purchasing the car?

That way once word spread about what happened dealers will be too scared to re-sell used Teslas? After all there's some states in the US where Tesla still can't sell their cars because dealers are trying to stop them. So this seems like pay back time...

I bet if a private owner sold their Tesla to another private owner, Tesla wouldn't do this.