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Comment by ricefield | Hacker News Reader

As long as I get to drive it, the distinction isn't very material to me. But I guess I'm not the type to work a lot on my car.

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At some point you'll probably want to replace it with something newer. The distinction becomes very important when you sell it. If buying a used Tesla means features are disabled then the resale value is going to be lower.

As the case in the article shows, this hurts the resale value of the car. If I spend $10-12k on software upgrades for a vehicle, and can't recover any of that money upon resale, I would call that a material distinction.

Every other car loses a high double-digit percentage of it's value the second you drive it off the lot. Resale value of cars doesn't seem to impact much in the consumer's mind

You can resell the software upgrades you bought. This article talks about a case where the dealer (according to Tesla) had not bought the software.

Does the feature get attached to the car, or is it associated with the first human licensee?

If the car had the license, and the car was returned and transferred to a third party dealer. Then the OEM decided that the entitlement no longer existed.

I'm not aware of any other scenario where a core component of a car isn't linked to the car. If Tesla didn't fuck up, they are applying Microsoft/Oracle software license terms to the car.

The license is attached to the car. According to the article, Tesla claims the car didn't have a license (but the software activated) when being sold to the dealer.

I’m not either. But if Tesla is going to do this, they need to shift from “selling” the car to merely “leasing” the car.

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