Is there a functional difference? Or put differently, why would someone prefer to have a repo person come and take away the asset, putting themselves and other people at risk of a physical encounter?
The remote locking requires remote connectivity, which means risk of errors or hacking. Also, once the ability to remote lock is built-in, it makes it easy to say "oh sure you paid for XYZ features, but once you sell the vehicle it is reset to factory defaults" — meaning the new owner has to pay for whatever you paid for already.
I'm not making the case that it's zero risk. But I think the risk is preferable to the alternative of a physical encounter. Maybe I'm old, but paying for software features seems a bit more of an edge case (I know HN skews towards SV, with a higher prevalence of Teslas. I don't know how prevalent paying for additional software-enabled features is with other car companies). I think the feature piece can easily be handled through other mechanisms, like regulations.
