Exactly; in other words, a telephoto may just be "a crop of a wide-angle," but in a wide-angle lens, the area any given field of view covers on a sensor will always be lower resolution than than if it were spread across the entire sensor by a telephoto lens.

Given the automotive context of this product, I would expect the goal was to maximize the resolution for center FOV (more clearly resolve objects further down the road) while simultaneously maximizing the overall FOV angle (see closer objects in peripheral vision).

In practice, the raw image probably looks like the old Photoshop "bulge" filter, and then somewhere in the image pipeline, it will get reprojected into a regular image that is quite blurry at the edges and becomes increasingly high-res toward the center.

(Another way of looking at this would be that this is an optical adaptation to the uniform, cartesian nature of image sensors, allowing a "foveated" image without a gradation in sensor pixel density.)