This is very troubling to read. I can understand that tampering with an automobile might pose safety concerns. I can also understand that Tesla is trying to protect its brand. That being said, the fact that Tesla is monitoring individual cars in a way that they can detect when you're used the Ethernet port is seriously Orwellian. I can only imagine this will get worse as cars become more autonomous.
The ability to potentially break your car has never stopped any other car in history from having an accessible engine compartment.
This is basically in tandem with the John Deere story - the consequences of proprietary software bleed into the physical world and cause an incredible amount of difficulty for people who do not even recognize what the problem is. Tesla can only get away with all this because of how digital the car is in the first place.
Replacing hardware parts and replacing software is diferent. Unofficial "jaibreak" software updates can contain errors or backdoors or intentionally written malicious functions programmed to be acivated on a special day.
Unofficial replacement parts can also be of lower quality and fail just as dangerously if not more so (e.g. a suspension part can break and a wheel literally falls off.)
Tinkering with an electric car when you don't know what you're doing will kill you so much more easily than a gasoline car will. That probably has something to do with it?
Alternatively, disconnect the steering column and drive off a cliff.
There are a thousand easy ways to kill yourself making uninformed modifications to any motor vehicle, by its nature. Its a ton of steel that goes up to a tenth the speed of sound. If anything, the reduced complexity of electric vehicles gives you fewer vectors for wrongdoing to screw yourself over. You can break any number of parts in a combustion engine to make it fail, whereas in an electric vehicle all you really have is steering column + drivetrain + battery pack.
It's much easier to intuit the risks from a mechanical danger than an electrical one. It's the difference between breaking a mechanical linkage and accidentally brushing up against a live terminal.
Seems that the chance of death from a gasoline explosion is much greater than an electric shock (of which a gas engine also has through smaller wires traditionally over longer runs).
I've definitely had my share of gas spills working on cars and boats. There are also very high voltage sparks going on. Then a gasoline car has several moving parts w/ vibrations while electrical motors are relatively vibrationless (assumes less chance of vehicle falling on you).
You can easily use the same mechanisms to secure personal computers to secure cars. Have a signing key for firmware uploads that the owner (or if they do not want the signing key, the dealer/manufacturer) controls.
I think what will happen is that as more cars leave warranty Tesla will be increasingly pressured to provide a "jailbreak" option for people who want to keep driving and servicing their Tesla. If they don't capitulate then regulators will eventually force the issue. They can get away with this now because their cars are all high-end and still under warranty, but it will change with the Model 3. Tesla probably knows this, but they'll hold on for as long as they can because there are many advantages to having total control of the life cycle. Things might get ugly at some point, though.
