Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> (I'm assuming that Tesla only made the owner pay the cost of the 60 battery swap even though they replaced it with a 90) It says right there that it was done under warranty. If my RTX3080 breaks, and Nvidia sends me a 3080Ti as a replacement(because maybe they don't have any 3080 in stock) then no, they can't lock it down to 3080 level 3 years later with a software update. And yes, I'm allowed to sell it on as a 3…
A decade or so ago you used to be able to unlock cores on certain AMD CPU's; there was no guarantee that the core would be stable though. The core could be fine without heavy load and have errors when pushed closer to 100%. If there was a similar level of binning done for Tesla batteries they should be able to limit the battery especially if there are safety concerns; sounds like that's not the case here though.
That also used to happen a lot with Intel CPUs, especially late in a product cycle: after refining fab their yields would be so good there wasn't any "bad" part to bin down, so they'd just soft-disable cores on high-end parts (I think after a while manufacturers started fusing the cores).