[snowwrestler]

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.