It's funny what kind of hand wavy fearmongering rhetoric people engage in when computers are involved. Hackers are this generation's witches, and that's why we keep locking them up for trivial and harmless manipulations.

It's not any different from being able to do that to hardware. That's why cars have to meet certain standards in order to be legal for driving on public roads.

It seems likely to me that making certain changes to a Tesla through rooting would just mean the car would end up not being street legal.

It's not, but I'm pretty sure it's also illegal to disable your brakes and then drive your car on a public road.

And thus, when it comes to software modification, the only reasonable course of action is make the equivalent of opening the hood illegal?

And yet the right to disassemble and replace the brakes on my car is socially and legally accepted. Why is it suddenly "scary" to modify the software?