[wizofaus]

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.

[kstrauser]

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.