Even if you think that Tesla will be a tremendously successful, the auto business is relatively low margin and highly competitive, and there is no reason for their stock price to to be more than ford and GM combined.

Unless, of course, Tesla can find a way to extract more money from its customers by forcing them to pay over, and over, and over again, because nothing says automobile ownership like, “You don’t own this, you just have a license, until we change out minds.”

Specifically, Tesla is disabling premium features on resold cars, which means that they are going to charge people for features that have already been paid for.

Somehow, I do not think that going the route of Oracle corporation is not going to be a good look for them:

One of the less-considered side effects of car features moving from hardware to software is that important features and abilities of a car can now be removed without any actual contact with a given car. Where once de-contenting involved at least a screwdriver (or, if you were in a hurry, a hammer), now thousands of dollars of options can vanish with the click of a mouse somewhere. And that’s exactly what happened to one Tesla owner, and, it seems many others.

Alec (I’ll withhold his last name for privacy reasons) bought a 2017 Tesla Model S on December 20 of last year, from a third-party dealer who bought the car directly from Tesla via auction on November 15, 2019. The car was sold at auction as a result of a California Lemon Law buyback, as the car suffered from a well-known issue where the center-stack screen developed a noticeable yellow border.

When the dealer bought the car at auction from Tesla on November 15, it was optioned with both Enhanced Autopilot and Tesla’s confusingly-named Full Self Driving Capability; together, these options totaled $8,000. You can see them right on the Monroney sticker for the car:

………

Tesla officially sold the car to the dealership on November 15, a date I’ve confirmed by seeing the car’s title. On November 18, Tesla seems to have conducted an “audit” of the car remotely. The result of that audit was that when the car’s software was updated to the latest version in December, the Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self Driving Capability (FSD) were removed from the car.

This sort of crap is why I am not bullish on Tesla.

They, and by that I mean Elon Musk, simply do not understand the auto market.