Sadly, it’s been a good part of IBM’s business model for years. They call it Capacity Upgrade on Demand.

Inactive processor cores and inactive memory units are resources that are included with your server, but are not available for use until you activate them.

I learned this when I moved into a corporate IT environment with Power servers. I couldn’t believe that some companies would pay a quarter of a million for a server that is intentionally stunted/limited unless you pay even more.

But cars are computers now. “Everything’s computer!”. So they will follow that subscription model.