Very interesting idea. It would mean the CPO margins in some cases could get really good. For this to work you of course only enable it to go in one direction, so the used car buyer can only enable features and add a badge, and not the other way around.
Actually I think it can go both ways. We are talking about the same physical costs. So it you sell initially with a premium option turned on for say $10k. Then when you trade in, this gets depreciated down to say $4k. So Tesla nets $6k for having turned on that feature for the first owner. It doesn't really matter is that feature is turned off for the second owner, or turned on for $2k or for $8k. The pricing of that option in the CPO is determined the the price that generates the maximum revenue, i.e., it optimized the option price times the probability of uptake at that price.
So all kinds of soft features can work like this, autopilot, Supercharger access, and more. What about features that depend on expensive physical equipment? Let's take battery pack size. Certainly used battery packs can be switched in the CPO. So this does allow for some degree of reconfigurability. But for new cars there may be a big advantage to configuring in market.
For example, Tesla ships bodies, motors and batteries separately to Tilburg for assembly in the EU. It could be advantageous to simply configure cars in Tilburg, rather custom building each one in Fremont. Thus, European customers can special order their dream car and within weeks it could be assembled and full configured at Tilburg. There is no need for these customers to wait for their car to be shipped to Europe because Tilburg has all the components in inventory from which to custom configure the car. European wait times would come down substantially, which would boost demand and customer satisfaction. It may even reduce inventory costs. This model of in market final assembly and configuration could be replicated to different regional and national markets. It also opens up more options for distributed manufacturing. For example, a European Gigafactory could easily supply regional battery packs.
But how much of this could get pushed out to the local stores. Suppose you do final assembly in Tilburg, but there are a buck of features that can be configured at you local store, say Copenhagen. So predictive analytics can be used to build out preconfigured stock. When the customer places an order, a suitable preconfigured car is shipped immediately to the Copenhagen store. The customer takes delivery of their custom configured car within weeks of placing their order.
Tesla could stand to do a lot of innovation in rapidly delivering customized products. How else can they scale to millions of cars per year?
