Oh my god, this should be illegal. What an environmental waste to block what hardware can do for business reasons, is there any global lobby fighting bullshit like this?
This kind of thing has existed forever. Cars are starting to do it, too, as it gets cheaper to make them all the same and disable some features in software.
HEVs also use only about 50% of the battery to reduce wear on it (go from 30 to 80 charge, no more).
But anyway, I won't buy a vehicle with a subscription based feature list that isn't something like a concierge service. If it's in the vehicle, I've already paid for the gear. (This changes once there's a community of moto hackers that can disable the lockouts... ish)
Ehh, you're never supposed to drain an old school lead-acid battery below 50% either. And car engine controllers won't let you give it more gas to go past the redline.
The evil here is purely "pay monthly to unlock a configuration option", not the existence of such wear limiters. And that part is new.
