The race for autonomous cars is over. Silicon Valley lost

It will be a sad day if and when real innovation loses to the sale of personal information for the purpose of surveillance and advertising.

I agree that the OEM's in general have done a better job of responding to the threat from the valley than the valley has done of adapting to the challenge of manufacturing things made of atoms.

But the race. It hasn't even begun. We aren't even clear about what the starting positions are.

Experiments have been conducted on automating cars since at least the 1920s; promising trials took place in the 1950s and work has proceeded since then. The first self-sufficient and truly autonomous cars appeared in the 1980s, with Carnegie Mellon University's Navlab and ALV projects in 1984 and Mercedes-Benz and Bundeswehr University Munich's Eureka Prometheus Project in 1987.

Autonomous cars are far from a new idea and companies and institutions spend serious amounts of time and money on this. The technology did not make it into production because it was not quite good enough, to expensive or the required computing power took up to much room. But if you started looking into the subject in the late 2000s or even later, then you are certainly late to the party and established car manufacturers and suppliers might have quite a head start for you to catch up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars

Is there any data these big companies will not collect?

Except they did not. US == technology, innovation, risk, success / failure. Europe == traditional engineering, lack of innovation, fear.

For the sake of argument the automakers are incapable of making an infotainment that would not suck. I do not quiet understand how can people think that traditional automakers while good at making cars, logistics and selling would better and more competitive in TECHNOLOGY than people from Silicon Valley. Also SV is not trying to make money and compete with automakers at this point. They are in it to win in the long run.

I think Apple under Steve Jobs would've pulled it off as well, especially if Steve decided to go "thermonuclear war" on Musk for "stealing" his employees. But with Tim Cook the chances were much smaller. Tim Cook still hasn't started moving Macs to ARM, and Steve Jobs would've probably done it like 2 years ago. Windows is actually going to do that first, even though it's significantly harder for Microsoft to pull it off than it is for Apple. Microsoft tends to support legacy stuff a lot longer, and it has a lot more to support.