The amount of data collected by your average Goog/Cruise/Uber autonomous vehicle is on the order of gigabytes per minute. I highly doubt Tesla is phoning home data at that level of detail.
Tesla on the other hand has hundreds of thousands of cars on the road and is rapidly on their way to 1M cars. Data won’t be as raw and abundant, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t potentially very useful none the less.
Not sure how close this puts them in the race.
Simply putting more SDCs on the road does not guarantee they will focus on the data they need.
Agree completely