This was a good move on Tesla's part, but the dark side of this is that they could also "flip a switch" to reduce the range of cars. Presumably they could also disable the car entirely, disable the brakes or rev the motor at an unsafe time, or cause the battery to catch fire.

All of this seems very implausible for a company like Tesla, but cars can last a very long time and companies and society change over those time scales. It's not hard to imagine an authoritarian government forcing an auto manufacturer to mess with the cars of protesters, journalists, or anyone else they don't like and to use the implicit threat to encourage compliance from everyone else.

I'm not saying this is a likely outcome for anyone who buys an electric car, but it is new failure mode that didn't exist in older, non-internet-connected cars.

It's kind of frustrating that there doesn't seem to be a middle ground between giving an enormous amount of power to supposedly-benevolent-for-now product manufactures or finding and disabling the car's antenna and not getting any updates again ever. (Hopefully the car doesn't just refuse to function if it's not able to phone home?)