Even the transmissions in school buses have worked this way for more than two decades now. The Allison 2500-series is built with 6 gears (plus one reverse) but usually 6th gear is disabled in the software as users buy the 5-gear variant. The 6-gear variant is more expensive and 5-gear buyers can upgrade to that down the road if they want to - or you can crack it with widely-available software, something that many people in the skoolie community take advantage of.
At least 6th gear isn’t a subscription service … yet.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
That kind of makes sense in context, since for leasing it’s not their hardware and they’re probably doing accounting based on the amortized costs of using them
But no I did not know that and it is pretty cool