Well you'll need to take out your tin foil hat from under the desk but I think this is a boiling frogs situation. Today it's Acceleration Boost and Full Self-Driving but tomorrow it will be smaller things.

To be fair to Tesla, infotainment systems were already heading in this direction, but they have a well established after market and most of the time it's very easy for people to refuse the option and install their own (with Apple/Google/etc integration). Tesla didn't invent this, but the move from just an add-on to what some might consider core "car" functionality seems to me like it can be attributed to Tesla. There is an argument to be had over whether those features are core or not -- are you selling a car that has better acceleration or not? Does it self drive or not? The answer becomes a maybe only because of Tesla's choices, and marks a shift in the thinking. For example turbo'd cars have to get their turbos tuned dynamically -- imagine a world where you have to pay for your car's turbo tuning as a service every month.

> Then again buy or lease a BMW and you'll need to pay a lot of money to the dealer for simple parts to be changed, because a, the parts are pricey, b, the parts are hard to access. The Tesla at least doesn't have that -hardware- issue.

I agree that the current luxury market has a lot of fat. Tesla has come a long way in reducing the fat (the amount of vertical integration they've done is amazing), but my problem is that I don't think the choice to buy an option that isn't doing this monetization model will be around much longer in the worst case.

> I'm a recent Tesla owner. What's the worst case scenario you're envisaging ?

I mean realistically, a world where cars are just another rent-seeking vehicle for conglomerates. For most of history you could buy a car that just worked, and eventually it would become an asset to you and "pay itself off". Cars that never pay themselves off are great at first, until you hit the inflection point where they would have paid themselves off. In a world where most cars (and/or functionality) are leases and thus rent-able machinery, it feels kind of like kicking the ladder in a way that's hard for me to pin down.

Further down the road in my worst case scenario, non-self-driving cars are outlawed all together for safety reasons (once the tech is down it will very likely be hard to argue for letting people put others in danger).

[EDIT] - Just to add for people who have never dealt with turbo-ing their own cars or getting "tunes" for turbo setups, you tune turbo setups on cars and essentially get a golden set of data that works for a certain performance profile. This is necessary because altitude, pressure, specifics of your setup can cause changes in what the software should be telling the components to do at any given time or place in the "power band" (your tachometer, roughly).

This is the kind of thing that can be a dark art since you could optimize nearly endlessly and bad settings are dangerous but once you do it can be reproduced for near free given similar inputs (and of course, dealer-made cars are very similar inputs by design). It would be a perfect thing to SaaS-ify -- most performance-concerned consumers wouldn't think twice about paying $xx or even $xxx a month for a decent tune (assuming a decent general tune wasn't free). Then you have to do things like make sure they're not hobbling base tunes to make premium models more attractive (this has happened in the past already IIRC).