> It's not that different from modifying an older car. There's a huge practical difference between gearheads modifying the physical parts of their cars and a w

> It's not that different from modifying an older car. There's a huge practical difference between gearheads modifying the physical parts of their cars and a world where any Tesla buyer could as easily tweak engine, breaking etc. performance as they could download an app or re-flash their phone. You'd have idiots who'd otherwise never bothered to modify their cars dying as a result of trying to rice up their ride. It's the same situation as RC planes and drones. The RC community had a natural selection bias for decades and wasn't worth regulating, then drones became available on the mass-market resulting in a bunch of idiocy that regulators needed to scramble to keep up with. I think car manufacturers are rightly paranoid about that. There's a lot of profoundly stupid and unsafe stuff you could trivially do with a Tesla if you had access to the software, and if it was easy to install those sorts of things people would do so en masse.