Most cars have engine options, you pay more for a bigger engine that is more costly to manufacture. It is reasonable and moral to ask for money to cover your increased manufacturing costs and also to profit for providing this wanted extra ability.
In Telsa’s case, you get the same battery with the same reserve capacity, which has the same manufacturing cost. Telsa has purposely degraded your battery, expending extra effort to do so, in order to reap profit by charging you to remove the harm they caused rather than adding any value.
That can’t be rationalized as customer service, it is unethical.
Whats wrong with that? Computer companies do it all the time. They install a bank of memory or processing power, and if you pay, they switch it on. So two customers could have identical configurations, but one has more power than the other based on what they pay.
This practice has been going on for years. Why is it unethical if Tesla does it?
There’s always been feature layers in cars, the stripped down model, the mid-model, the full model. The only difference now is there’s a kind of car out there so computerized that some of the features you can pick from are controlled entirely by software. But the rules hold, you pick your feature set, you pay for it, and you get those features. These people didn’t pay for the extra range feature, how they don’t get the feature they didn’t pay for is immaterial.
They have been doing this since the early days of the model S. They offered a 40KWh model that few people wanted. They decided to use a 60KWh battery and to software limit it to 40KWh for the few people that wanted less capacity. The early models had optional supercharging modules. They decided to install the module on all cars and enable it through software. They are doing the same thing with the autopilot hardware.
I suspect Tesla has a sizable leasing business and this gives them the flexibility to reconfigure the car for another lease or sale.