As already was said, the cloud is and always has been composed of “cloud storage” AND “cloud compute”. We may see way more compute these days of course with tokenized work or services like GeForce Now or Shadow that let you play games and stream the video back to you, but they’ve both always been available. Tesla using Cloud compute is not a new decision, they’ve always been processing all of that data remotely as well, even if the car is doing some and eventually all of the work. You’re trying to be weirdly pedantic here for some reason, and are just way off base anyways. Even if 100% of the compute is being done in the car, the ride hailing service is all that needs to disappear to brick these cars and Tesla owns access to the service and can shut it down any time.

I’m so happy for you that you haven’t had your soul properly crushed by corporate America this decade. There’s nothing logical about how corps operate - the market never judges anyone appropriately for awful practices, government almost never holds them accountable for awful practices, and so they keep doing worse and worse shit that turns a quick buck. “Bad business decisions” are repeatedly rewarded in the market:

• WB took a write off rather than market and release Batgirl (completed film, $90M spent) and Coyote Vs Acme (completed film, $70M spent, only allowed the film makers to shop it around and released 3 years later because of enormous backlash for a highly anticipated film).
• Disney removed 50 titles from Disney+ and Hulu for the sake of a $1.5B tax write off, only achievable by lowering the value of their service. Often the only place the content was available, now it is just deleted off the internet with no legitimate way to watch it.
• Paramount did the same content cancelation and complete eradication for millions of dollars of write-downs. Just weeks after airing the finale of one particular show, it fully disappeared from the internet.
• Sony’s Concord wasn’t performing well and so after 8 years of development and millions spent, the solution wasn’t fix it, market it better, tweak the business model. The solution, 11 days after release, was to erase the game. All 10 people (/s) who bought it were refunded and they turned off the game servers. Game completely dead.
• Microsoft shut down Blizzard’s “Odyssey” after 6 years in development over fixing their engine.
• Anthem (EA) and The Crew (Ubisoft) were live service games that were just shut down. Ubi took it a step further of revoking all licenses previously sold. They could open source the server software of a game they don’t want to support any longer, or they could continue to sell the game box and strike a deal with another company to operate the servers. Instead, just pull the cord and fuck all the fans who paid money for it. ¯\(ツ)/¯

And this doesn’t even start down the path of private equity buying up companies, strip mining their assets, ruining everything that gave the brand it’s good reputation (because it’s expensive to do things right) , and selling them once they have turned them to utter shit.

The world’s politicians are failing us - the fact that any of this shit is legal is obscene. The internet doesn’t need to “stop working” for some dipshit with a balance sheet at Tesla to decide, “well, we sold all our Cybercab hardware and have no liabilities here - and software dev and server hardware is costing us too much, shut that shit down.” After all, they’ve been claiming autonomy for so long, yet they have not achieved it. They don’t have the ability to do what they claim, yet they’re STILL selling the product today on the promise of future updates.

This is the same company that sold $50,000 pre-orders for a Roadster that a decade later STILL has not been released, fraudulently sold FSD for $15k to drivers for 2 decades with a promise all their cars would be upgraded as necessary (they haven’t), artificially created a monopoly and actively blocks independent shops from working on their vehicles, manipulates their odometers digitally, and shuts off its FSD system moments before it causes a crash so that they can legally blame the driver for fucking up and take zero responsibility. So you’re saying the only logical reason for cybercab to die is “the internet stops working”, that THIS company who has repeatedly overpromised and underdelivered for their entire existence would NEVER just shutter the whole project and leave owners holding the bag? That THIS company who has yet to “solve” autonomous driving (despite claims) somehow has no technical hurdles that could destroy this project?

Bull. Shit.

Isn’t it fun that the media offers a presumption of innocence when we’re talking about our evil billionaire oligarchs despite hard facts to the contrary, but we get a presumption of guilt even when there is zero evidence to back it up?