You still have to buy a Tesla. You’re acting like it’s a win to control the software that is on the hardware that you own. It’s sad that it is.

I wonder if someone could jailbreak the Tesla to make it fly? That would be something.

Obligatory –Jailbreak The Tesla

So many people are going to brick their teslas

You would need to be crazy to apply a voltage regulation hack to the CPU that they don’t sell spare parts if something goes wrong. Risking bricking a $50000 car to unlock the $300 heated seats?

And while the root access is unpatchable, because the car is always connected to internet and always sharing too much telemetry to their servers, it would be trivial for them to add an additional server side check to see if some feature has been unlocked without paying.