On the topic of costs, they cut the Homelink chip recently:
(Fred link)
Tesla removes Homelink from standard Model 3 features, now a $300 aftermarket product - Electrek
It can be installed by Tesla Service for $300 if you request it.
I've been thinking about this and I think it's correct. It's a third-party chip and the licensing fee is probably high. People who park outdoors, or in shared apartment-building-style parking garages, or have manual garage doors simply don't use it.
Now, the patents on Homelink should have expired (circa 2017). So it should be possible for Tesla to create a home-brewed garage door opener implementation and implement it in much cheaper than whatever they're paying in licensing fees. They clearly have not done that yet. But in the meantime, getting out from the licensing fees may be a meaningful cost reduction, and a lot of people don't use the feature at all.
The Model Y replacement of 70 parts with 5 in the rear will probably be adopted by the Model 3.
There's gonna be a lot of this stuff.
I am curious how many people have zero use for the functionality - not in a could use their standard remote sense, but actually don't have any garage door or gate to go through, i.e. street parking or non-gated or non-RF (PIN code, RFID, etc) gated communities. For the S/X removing it would be probably silly, but for the 3/Y, especially on the SR, this may actually not a terrible idea to both reduce costs and monetize a "lesser used" feature to a greater extent.
Emotionally this feels like a silly cost cutting move, and I bet their cost is nowhere near $300-labor for the unit, but it probably is a separate unit connected via a harness connector someplace, not embedded into any Tesla bespoke hardware, so installing it "aftermarket" should be trivial, and the only production line change should be not installing it (versus switching to a different module and changing harnesses to use an external module and so on), plus of course a minor software change so that the car knows whether or not the device exists (so it doesn't throw errors if it would have, and hide the menu option since it's not there)
Everyone already has openers for their garages / gates / etc, so it's not like losing is crippling, though it does feel cheap to remove the feature by default, even if you don't have an immediate use for it.
I would be astonished if the module cost more than $50, and even at that price whomever is their supplier is ripping them off for what ought to be about $5-10 at most in parts all in (licensing fees and Homelink profiteering aside). So probably half an hour job to install it at most, this should be something like a 200% margin add-on.
So I'm sort-of okay with this as an investor, but boy would I be annoyed as a customer. Sort of how I'm okay with all the price changes (though they should be less haphazard) and so on as an investor but I'm kind of annoyed with the fact that I now effectively paid "too much" for my LR 3 (though to be fair, with the timings of tax credits and uncertainty of backlogs and being able to buy a RWD LR so that I have the longest range 3 currently in existance... and this is Tesla and I knew it would happen eventually).
I'm actually sort of surprised there isn't already alternatives to the homelink solution. Nobody cares about the X-10 wireless support, almost nobody ever used that to do anything from their car and X-10 is a dead/dying standard (now if it could speak Insteon, Z-Wave, Zigbee, or something else modern, perhaps HTTP REST to a custom endpoint after connecting to your home wifi, that would be at least interesting), and universal replacement garage door remotes have existed forever that aren't "Homelink compatible". Perhaps the patents specifically call out integrating the RF device into the vehicle, blocking (until recently) anyone from doing even basic GDO functionality. Still, if the patents expired in 2017, there should have already been Chinese suppliers with fully tested devices ready to go the same day.
