We’ve heard news about Apple disabling battery capacity remotely but well, Apple isn’t the only high tech company capable of such act as Tesla did the same according to a report gotten on Jalopnik reports.

What did happen is that the car was resold by a third-party dealer who bought the car at an auction held by Tesla itself but the buyer didn’t pay for the AutoPilot feature so won’t be eligible for its use.

Initially, the feature was activated upon purchase just as they were advertised to be included in the package as at the time of purchase. What raised eyebrows is when Tesla turned the feature off remotely. The company claimed it can Yank access to software features.

Tesla cars can be upgraded remotely which even though used cars that are resold still get hardware upgrades such as Four-wheel drive or Adaptive Cruise control.

The Model S and other Tesla vehicles can apparently lose key features upon this upgrades. Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Alec, who is the owner of the Tesla according to Jalopnik bought the car last December whereas the dealer bought it a month earlier from the Tesla auction with features such as “AutoPilot” and “Full Self Driving Mode” features intact according to Jalopnik which reviewed the sales document that relates to the car’s ownership and sales.

Afterwards, the dealer simply listed the Car for sale while advertising these features but the dealer didn’t know that Tesla had independently conducted a software “Audit” of the car after it had sold it while disabling these features during the December update.

The end result: when Alec picked up the car on December 20th, he did not have access to all its advertised features.

After contacting Tesla customer support, Alec was given the bad news:

Tesla has recent identified instances of customers being incorrectly configured for Autopilot versions that they did not pay for. Since, there was an audit done to correct these instances. Your vehicle is one of the vehicles that was incorrectly configured for Autopilot. We looked back at your purchase history and unfortunately Full-Self Driving was not a feature that you had paid for. We apologize for the confusion. If you are still interested in having those additional features we can begin the process to purchase the upgrade.

Tesla Sales Rep

The price tag stamped on the AutoPilot and self driving feature which would make the Model S retain these features is a whooping $8000 but Alec already purchased the car with the believe that those features were included in the package he got but Tesla is now demanding that Alec pay for these features if he wants them reactivated.

As its normally said, most tech companies owns our devices as purchases can be like a license to own it rather than ownig it entirely probably why you never get to erase their logo from their products as well as them having full control of its system remotely.

This is obviously not the first time we’ll be seeing Tesla do this Over-the-air updates which had caused anxiety on numerous cases. Alec’s case raised lots of eyebrows as to if car owners are really the owner of their vehicles or not. But such remote access isn’t possible until recently and its probably part of how quick technology had improved which has its good side as well such as car theft which can be remotely deactivated.