I work for one of the tier 1 automotive suppliers mentioned, and the author couldn't be more wrong about data.

We have exceedingly large data sets -- equating to millions of km of driving from locations all around the globe -- and we use that data in a very disciplined and very effective manner.

(My particular area of interest is in the use of off-line machine learning algorithms to analyse and optimise the algorithms that go onto the vehicle as embedded software).