I believe that at some point in the future they will launch a joint-venture for a fully automated Uber competitor with Tesla handling designing and building the vehicles and Google providing cash, self-driving software and building the actual app.

Musk is literally too good friends with Sergey Brin and Larry Page for this not too happen.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/elon-musk-and-larry-page-ha...

http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-secret-apartment-elon...

Data is the ammo that will win the war of self-driving car companies.

Tesla, with a large, update-able fleet in the field, has a much larger data-collection platform than Google. Even if they're not using it for full automation now, the collection itself is very valuable.

This is almost certainly why Uber is putting self-driving cars into the field now as well, even though they are clearly not ready for prime-time. They need those sensor packages to be driving around on real roads and in real traffic.

But in terms of collecting training data to develop the algos that will eventually be fully autonomous, Tesla is way out in front. That's what the OP meant: every Tesla is collecting information that gets sent back to HQ to train the neural nets (or whatever) that will eventually drive the cars themselves.