[kevincox]

The counter-argument is that you are "unfairly" shifting the cost to others assuming that if a workaround wasn't available you would have paid the premium price. Let's say that it is expected that 1/3 of people will purchase heated seats. If you unlock your seats without paying then you are harming Tesla because the heated seats package was priced assuming that 1/3 buy it (so it was priced at 3x the per-car hardware cost plus some markup). Now less than 1/3 people buy it (as they are hacking it to be available) so it was underpriced and they lose money. Next year Tesla adjust their expectations to 1/4 people buy it and accordingly raise the price of the package (Now 4x per-car hardware cost + markup because it still has to cover the cost of installing the hardware in all cars). Now you are harming the people who are buying the package because they are paying for the cost of the hardware that you are using without paying.

> They sold you something in its entirety, including the seats with wires.

This is the part I have to agree with. There should be nothing to legally prevent me from doing whatever I want with my hardware. It may be unethical to use this hardware without paying for it, but I shouldn't be legally prevented from doing it. They did sell me this hardware even if the cost was paid for by those buying the heated seat package and I should be able to do whatever I want with it.

I think this works quite well with things like CPUs where they blow hardware fuses to disable features and it is infeasible to restore this functionality at any practical scale. However for things like seat warmers where the controller is likely easy to bypass (and in this case the lock is actually implemented very far away in the infotainment system) it will likely turn into a arms race between tamper-resistant hardware and those who what to unlock the feature without paying for it.