The most likely reason I see for them disabling the feature in OTA would be if countries pass legislation forcing them to. In that case, the car owner would likely not have recourse like in the PS/Linux case since they were legally required to remove it.

To be honest, I'm really surprised this hasn't happened in EU countries. If you'd asked me 10 years ago whether the EU would allow their entire road system to be used for a public beta test of half-baked semi-auto driving systems, I'd have said there is no way. Yet tesla just went ahead and pushed that feature out in a firmware update and noone really seems to have challenged them on it. I expect with this recent coverage, we'll see that.

Not sure exactly to what you're referring, but if it involves hacking your Tesla to re-enable it,

a) that will vastly reduce the level of usage, and b) the OTA update could very well completely remove the code from storage, making the job of hacking a much more involved process than just enabling a flag.

Sony is settling a class-action suit with people who bought PS3s while relying on the "Other OS" feature. So, it's not about technical ability to re-enable the Autopilot feature; it's about being liable to their customers who relied on the feature being present when they shelled out $70k+.

Ah. Indeed. I suspect that if they do disable this, though, it'll be my NTSB mandate, so they won't have much of a choice - similar to the VW thing. They might then have to deal with the resulting lawsuits, but I can see many scenarios where they don't have a chance to avoid them. Tesla did, after all, sell a product with an advertised feature that isn't ready for prime-time.