[Yaggo]

Tesla Model 3 SR+ were originally sold without rear seat heating. Later it became possible to enable it for a fee, via the Tesla app. Few clicks and voilá, suddenly you have rear seat heating.

So every car already had the hardware, obviously because it would be more expensive for Tesla to produce two variants of seat elements.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

This model has been around for a long time. I recall a job back in 1997 where I had to add code to permit a service person to enable a feature on a machine. All the machines shipped with the same hardware for the reason you said: manufacturing costs would be too high to make some with and some without.

I had never heard of this before so I asked if it wouldn't piss customers off to see that they were just paying for some guy to come in and enter a code and not to actually install anything physical. The answer was "it never has before." We'd been doing it for years by that point.

[mr_toad]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination