All it takes is a software update for these to be bricks. If (and when) Tesla goes under, I doubt they will allow driverless cars that are no longer owned by a company. They will inevitably lock their firmware down as much as possible. It will, for all intents and purposes, just stop working the day the company stops existing.

Or the new model will come out and they’ll just stop supporting them. Or any number of other cynical tactics that Tesla and companies like it have shown time and again that they are totally open to doing.

How are these going to be any different than the e-waste scooters and bikes that have to be Frankensteined (Berm Peak YT link) to barely get working? And these can’t even be used as traditional cars as a fallback. They are made only to be driven by wire.

Now any minor stoppage is a journey ender. Need to go around an accident and an officer is directing but your car is confused? Can’t. Need to interrupt it as it starts approaching an animal or child it doesn’t see? Can’t. Need to pursue in rough weather because someone is injured in the passenger seat? Can’t.

Sure, you might say, “But you wouldn’t hire one of these vehicles in those scenarios.” But now that vehicle is destined for a short life as an upscale taxi that will never be used for anything practical. No second chance to do literally anything practical or useful.

These are all things every single car up to this point has been expected to be able to do. It’s a machine at the end of the day. The new standard is to start taking those things away and finding a ways to make us pay a premium to get them back. Trust me when I say the end goal in these people’s minds is that we all sit in cars that we pay for but never get to drive.

So yes, I am cynical because every one of these companies has given me nothing but reason to be cynical.

"The cloud" refers (or at least originally referred) to a method of storing data on servers

The cloud is more than storage. It's also compute. It's Web apps. It's virtual machines. It's all kinds of things.

what you are saying at that point is "if the internet stops working"

No one is saying that. Tesla is selling these cars so people can earn money selling taxa services. What happens if Tesla decides this wasn't profitable anyway? They shut down the service that enables people to book the car. Can you still hail the cap? Can you make it drive if it's not connected?

that would be a stupid business-type decision, not a technical one.

Like when Sonos decided they didn't need to support 1st devices because they now needed to do more than they were capable of, so they just wanted to brick them (but ultimately didn't because of massive backlash)? How long will it be in Teslas best interest to support this particular platform? What if they include a new sensor in a later model and decide that the old model isn't relevant any longer? Will we see 1st gen cybercabs in 30 years, like we do other cars?

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.

As someone else pointed out, "Cloud" is a buzz word that also means rented compute. Pull the plug, cars die. IDK how exactly. They could get confused and attempt to ALL drive back to their parking lots I guess. Although it sounds like they will be wasted to me, still.