[bitL]

I guess it's speed concerns? Maybe they have a custom ASIC they use to pipe and adjust images from the camera, achieving optimal contrast? Using CPU for that is very very slow and self-driving car companies try to push latency down as much as possible, so it might be a limitation of specialized hardware.

[ksk]

Sure, but if they have to process the RAW data anyway, they could easily send an unaltered copy in parallel to storage for offline use. I guess depending on the resolution & bitness, they'd want to downsample/compress it to save space. Heh, anyway its just pure speculation on my part. They probably have a good reason to do it one particular way...