There are reasons that it's bad, but I don't see how it's bad for consumers. They just get increased optionality, which is almost never a bad thing. If the alternative were just lowering prices on the S and X then I guess it's bad relative to that, but we don't really have any reason to believe that Tesla would do that if this weren't an option.
I don’t generally like subscriptions on hardware features, I wouldn’t get one and I worry about what they’ll do in the future if this test goes well. But the “hardware I own” is not any more restricted than it was before they started the subscription option.
I would never buy hardware from a company that locks the capacity down with software, so a Tesla (nor BMW) is not the car for me.
> But if you don't want that to happen, you can just pay for the full-priced version.
Consumers should have full access to their hardware, limiting that is limiting consumer rights. It's also bad because it encourages other companies to do the same and soon people will be left with no options.
I get it, but too few people sell for what they need to, they sell for what they CAN. if there was more competition, that would force telsa to eat into this profit margin. Same goes for all businesses and industries.
I think the bigger issue though is the hypocracy. A large part of Tesla's marketing is based on pretending to care about the environment.