[jameslevy]

Is there any public research or data regarding the value or predicted delta value of long tail "average person" driving data of this kind versus the kind of data captured by driving around the same small portions of SF or MV? I've looked around but haven't found anything. Granted, Tesla and its competitors don't have an incentive to publish this kind of data...but are they even in a position to be able to calculate it currently?

[Animats]

Probably not. Ordinary staying-on-road is pretty much solved. There's years of dashcam imagery available.

The last minute of video before each crash would probably be more useful. Training on dashcam data of people doing stupid stuff from Youtube might be useful. You don't need steering, braking, and accel data; you can run a 3D SLAM algorithm to extract the path and get that.

[xbmcuser]

My 2 problems with Musk is that he has dismissed lidar in favor of just cameras because lidar is expensive. So far most of the Tesla auto pilot accidents would have been avoided with lidar. Even 2 very basic lidar sensors on the front and back could make a huge difference. And he calls a driver assistance system autopilot when it hasn't reached the level of autonomy which the word autopilot implies.