[kelnos]

> The customer didn't pay for a car with heated seats. The manufacturer included them anyway, but disabled them in software.

Sure they did. Maybe they didn't pay the full price for those heated seats, but they definitely paid more for the car with them (but disabled) than for a car without them entirely.

The carmaker is hoping that people will pay for the unlock in order to recoup their costs. But they're certainly not going to ship those heated seats in every car without inflating the cost of the base vehicle by some amount.

Put another way, it might look like this:

1. Car without heated seats at all: $10,000

2. Car with heated seats, but locked: $10,100

3. Car with heated seats, unlocked: $10,500

If the carmaker offered options 1 & 3, then customers would pay for what they want and get, and nothing more. If carmakers only offer option 2, then even customers who don't ever want heated seats will still pay some premium.

The carmaker might estimate that only 50% of their customers will pay an unlock fee for a car sold to them. They want to still cover their costs and make a tidy profit, so they might charge more than the $400 difference to unlock the feature. And that's if they're doing it in the non-shady way, and are charging a one-time fee. If they decide to charge a subscription, they might do something like charge $100/year for it, and then eventually they're just making pure profit for no added value.

Also consider that the carmaker's own costs could be, on average, greater per car if they have to offer two different options 1 & 3. Offering only option 2 (regardless of whether or not people are able to defeat the software lock) might be cheaper for them. I don't see why we need to subsidize their business decisions.

But all of this is still kinda irrelevant: bottom line is that if you sell piece of hardware to a customer, that hardware now belongs to the customer, and you don't get to tell the customer what they can and can't do with it.

[kevincox]

Money is fungible so it is really hard to say but it is entirely possible that the base model doesn't pay anything for the seats. They could sell the car with $10,000 and expect that 1/2 of the customers pay $500 for the upgrade. Those customers are essentially paying to install the seat hardware in all cars (because it is cheaper than them paying for a new production line that makes 1/2 the number of cars). So in 2 the purchaser of that car still pays $10k and their "other half" who statistically bought the heated seats paid for the $100 cost in their car.

You can also picture this as a marketing cost. Maybe Tesla things that a $100/car marketing cost is worth paying because they expect that 1/2 of the cars will pay $500 so they have $150 expected return.