imo its a bit different as they are using physical resources and then artificially limiting access. a better comparison would be getting a motherboard and having to pay extra to use some of the usb ports.
I think eventually there should be laws against wasting physical resources for monetary gain. if they want two models, make it such that they either don’t meet manufacturing requirements and are hard disabled (similar to cpu yield) or produce one with and one without.
There will always be some hardware waste, like even if your car doesn’t have fog lights, but the trim levels up from yours do, you probably still have all the wiring needed for the fog lights there. It’s easier to make one wire bundle than one for every config.
When it comes to stuff like heated seats I agree it seems like quite a waste and they should either just be included or not installed.
With Tesla specifically, I think this rear heated seat thing came about from when they wanted to reduce the sale price of the cheapest model 3 so that it was eligible for a federal rebate. They did this by software locking features that you could later pay to unlock. Besides the heated seats, they also locked the battery capacity, and maybe another thing or two. For that one rebate is probably not worth making a physically new model.
imo its a bit different as they are using physical resources and then artificially limiting access. a better comparison would be getting a motherboard and having to pay extra to use some of the usb ports.
I think eventually there should be laws against wasting physical resources for monetary gain. if they want two models, make it such that they either don’t meet manufacturing requirements and are hard disabled (similar to cpu yield) or produce one with and one without.
There will always be some hardware waste, like even if your car doesn’t have fog lights, but the trim levels up from yours do, you probably still have all the wiring needed for the fog lights there. It’s easier to make one wire bundle than one for every config.
When it comes to stuff like heated seats I agree it seems like quite a waste and they should either just be included or not installed.
With Tesla specifically, I think this rear heated seat thing came about from when they wanted to reduce the sale price of the cheapest model 3 so that it was eligible for a federal rebate. They did this by software locking features that you could later pay to unlock. Besides the heated seats, they also locked the battery capacity, and maybe another thing or two. For that one rebate is probably not worth making a physically new model.