I strong disagree. I'm not talking about making unauthorized copies of the car. I'm just going with the principle that's as old as the whole concept of property: once I buy something, it's mine.
If I own a shoe, I can paint it to look different or change its shoelaces. If I own a book, I can tear out the pages and rearrange them. If I own a TV, I can hook anything I want up to it. And if I own a car, I can modify it as I see fit. Those things are mine. If I no longer want them, I can sell them (barring a specific contract with the manufacturer, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine). And if a company wants me to pay them money while still retaining some kind of legal right to restrict how I use it, they can negotiate a discounted price for me to pay them.
When I walk onto a car lot, I'm not saying "whoa, check out this IP!" The salesperson doesn't hype me up by saying "you could own significant portions of this beauty today!" We don't sign a "purchase (most of it) contract". I don't pay "sales-but-all-rights-reserved" tax on it. The DMV lists me as the owner, not the IP licensee.
If I had to choose whether to support laws protecting IP versus laws protecting ownership, I'll pick ownership 100% of the time.
But the carmarker is surely within their rights to refuse to continue servicing your car, or declare that any attempt at modifying the electronics/software potentially makes it unroadworthy.
Having said that, I don't entirely understand why Tesla don't keep the software unloaded from the vehicles until the user chooses to purchase the add-on features: compared to everything else the software does, that's not exactly a particularly difficult engineering challenge.
That would likely be highly illegal of them, per the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. Unless they could prove that the process of you enabling the confiscated features caused something else to break, they're still on the hook for it.
If I own a shoe, I can paint it to look different or change its shoelaces. If I own a book, I can tear out the pages and rearrange them. If I own a TV, I can hook anything I want up to it. And if I own a car, I can modify it as I see fit. Those things are mine. If I no longer want them, I can sell them (barring a specific contract with the manufacturer, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine). And if a company wants me to pay them money while still retaining some kind of legal right to restrict how I use it, they can negotiate a discounted price for me to pay them.
When I walk onto a car lot, I'm not saying "whoa, check out this IP!" The salesperson doesn't hype me up by saying "you could own significant portions of this beauty today!" We don't sign a "purchase (most of it) contract". I don't pay "sales-but-all-rights-reserved" tax on it. The DMV lists me as the owner, not the IP licensee.
If I had to choose whether to support laws protecting IP versus laws protecting ownership, I'll pick ownership 100% of the time.