[huebnerob]

You’re well within your right to buy a Tesla, modify it to the moon and back, and use it independently however you want. I hate Tesla as a company and I’m a strong supporter of these rights, but I stop at claiming that businesses have an obligation to continue supporting a product with unknown arbitrary modifications.

To the extent that a product is designed to only operate efficiently (or at all) with continued access to manufacturer services, it’s probably a bad idea to disqualify yourself from that access. But there are only two ways to solve that, either A) disallow the sale of products that rely on first-party services, or B) requiring manufacturers to uphold their end of the services contract while you do god-knows-what with your end of it (the product). Neither of these is the clear moral high ground that hacker types seem to think they achieve in this argument.

[43920]

If Tesla (or any other company) can show that your modifications actually affect their ability to provide the services as designed, then sure, they shouldn't be required to provide them. But as long as the modifications I make don't actually affect the car's ability to operate, I don't see any reason why that should allow them to deactivate unrelated services.

[jjeaff]

There is also more important things at stake that make it very shortsighted and petty on Tesla's part to deny service.

Microsoft understands this which is why they offer updates to known pirated versions of their software.

Making things difficult for a few pirates is less important to them that making sure things stay secure. They also don't want a bunch of windows systems out there, slow due to viruses mucking up their reputation.