VW has done this in a sense forever. My Mk7 GTI came with the "performance package" which in some years included different brakes and a limited slip diff, but i

VW has done this in a sense forever. My Mk7 GTI came with the "performance package" which in some years included different brakes and a limited slip diff, but in other years was literally just an ECU flash that gave it an extra 10hp for hundreds to a couple thousand extra dollars. It was the general case in VAG cars going back as far as 2000 that the same engine hardware was sold with different software packages for different markets and trims essentially. The same trim made different performance figures in different emissions regimes too. Typically, you could take a car without the paid software boost into an official shop, pay a one time fee, and get that boosted software package. The fix is to go to any "Performance Automotive" shop, or buy a dongle on the internet for $200 that lets you just flash whatever you want to the ECU, because VW ECUs are surprisingly "open" (compare the ECU situation that Toyota has, where ECU reflashes basically weren't a thing) and then you can run +40ish hp and kill your undersized turbo at 80k miles, or turn off the soundaktor, or add some weird regulatory quirk of rear lighting, to enable extra features that you didn't pay for like radar cruise control. Sure, you can now pay $20 and only get that for a month, but how stupid do you have to be to do so compared to a one time $760 cost?