Tesla last November ended an unusual policy that prohibited U.S. leasing customers from buying their cars at lease-end.
The policy started in 2019, when Tesla announced that customers could lease its mass-market Model 3 sedans but would have to return them, at the end of the lease, for use in Tesla’s planned “robotaxi” network.
“Next year, for sure,” he added, “we’ll have over 1 million robotaxis on the road.”
None of that would prove true. Despite repeated promises, the robotaxis never came. Tesla instead found an unusually lucrative way to make money by flipping many of the off-lease cars to new buyers, according to four people familiar with Tesla’s retail operations.
Rather than storing the used cars – a fast-depreciating asset – Tesla started adding features to them through software upgrades. It then sold the vehicles to new customers who would pay thousands more than lease-end buyers would have, the people said.
I agree for the most part but the initial analogy about a game is very poor one. It’s more like your console was missing performance. They patched it, refurbished it, and then resold it as a Pro model and got more money out of it.
You can think of it that way if you want, but I’m not sure its completely honest. To use your console analogy, if you bought a Nintendo Switch, all of the hardware is in your hands to display the graphics, sound, and scripts of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. However, it won’t do that with what you buy in the box. You’ll have to shell out another $60 or so to buy the software that will use that hardware.
I have no interest in Full Self Drive. I’m certainly glad they didn’t include it in the cars and simply increase the price of the car because its there.
I think there’s definitely a slippery slope argument for locking features for physical hardware for anything. Just look at what John Deere for an already proven example.
There’s an argument for your point of view but I think the negatives far outweigh the positives. I doubt there’s a legal or even social argument against the practice stated in the article. I just think it’s worse for the consumer.
John Deere has been doing sketchy stuff especially on blocking the “right to repair” front. Thats an entirely different argument if thats where you were going. Thats preventing repair of functionality that was sold to the buyer but the buyer is prevented from making it work again without paying excessive fees/prices to John Deere to use otherwise perfectly legitimate John Deere salvage parts to restore the original function.
We’re talking about something else here. This is where there is functionality never sold to the buyer, and the buyer is trying to gain that extra functionality.
I can absolutely understand that perspective from the micro point of view, but what would actually be worse for the customer is if a manufacturer had to design, build, and maintain many different versions of something losing the economies of scale that bring costs down of building a whole bunch of one of something and then not enabling parts or use full function of what may be capable.
Consumers would actually be paying more if your method was forced to occur.