Tesla is free to do whatever is supported by contract law as it relates to software licensing, including stripping licenses off vehicles when transfers (like trade ins) done through Tesla (versus a private transfer).
Disclosure: We own several Teslas.
Personally I believe that the current licensing situation may be good for company profits, but presents a net negative for society. As a result I'm always happy when I see it being discussed rather than simply accepted as "the way things are".
There is a belief that when you buy a car, features you paid for should not disappear for the sole purpose of ripping off customers. I don't accept that shit, and will never buy from companies with scammy practices like this
>Tesla
I wish it was just tesla. BMW does this too, and I'm sure there are other cars I will never buy for this reason. I don't really care, I have other choices.
And the rest of society is free to use the legal system against Tesla, and to change laws so as to punish them specifically, or the court system. And I personal hope that such things could be applies retroactively.
There is a lot of shady tricks a lot of companies do (but not all of them), like planned obsolesce, but disabling features of a product retroactively and demanding you pay again to re-enable those features is not a common occurrence and even worse in my opinion.
> I mean, they aren't giving it away.
Tesla wants to get paid for the same thing more than once. If they made sure the customer knows from the get go that some of their features are really subscriptions to a service and not ownership, then OK, but that's not what they are doing.
