I think I understand some of what you are getting at, but may be a bit hypothetical? This threads already done a lot of hypothesizing.Can we all agree that if someone rooted a car and enabled features that were not paid for, such as, for example, to add EAP or FSD, and during an audit Tesla discovers the car has features activated that it should not have, that Tesla is entitled to remove those features?
What about if the rooted car having features added that were not paid for is then sold to an innocent non-Tesla dealer or innocent private party buyer, and after the car is titled in the name of the new owner, Tesla discovers during an audit that the configuration of the vehicle was altered. Would it be permissible for Tesla to change the configuration to remove the improperly (unauthorized) added features? Doing so would penalize the innocent non-Tesla dealer and/or private party buyer who may have paid a premium for the vehicle.
What if the non-Tesla dealer changed the configuration and then sold the car at a premium to the innocent private party buyer? Can Tesla come in and remove the features?
Things become complicated when software is involved that can be revised with relative ease. As more cars become available on the used market this is going to be an increasingly bigger issue. I’m not sure how one can protect themselves from buying a car having an unauthorized configuration that Tesla later changes except to buy directly from Tesla. And that may not even be enough if they don’t catch the unauthorized configuration before the used vehicle is sold.
Maybe Tesla!s solution is to do what they are doing; namely, remove all the value added features (EAP, FSD, FUSC, etc) from all resold vehicles and require the new owner to rebuy the features s/he wants. Not something I am thrilled about.
Are you making a case as to why Tesla should habitually strip software add-ons from their cars? Of course illegal enabling of features by hacking is..... Err... Illegal, and if Tesla think it is happening then a) build in better security and b) persue those responsible to the full extend of the law.
To come after your good customers who buy in good faith and rip value out of that group of people is beyond unacceptable.
Also, maybe we are straying too far from OP. All interesting, but in this case the core issue is just that Tesla released a car from their stock without completing the processes they needed to in order to remove a feature from the car.
What their intentions were makes no odds. As others have said, the very essence at auction is 'what you see is what you get, sold as-is' so when you put a car up for auction, be sure to take off your fancy wheels before hand if you want to keep them, because the car will be priced and sold based on what is actually there.
If you can't do that in time, then wait for the next auction.
If the features were changed in a way that materially effected the car's value after the sale was concluded at auction, then in so doing Tesla defrauded the party that bought the car.