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It's likely far cheaper to store it than it would be to run the test again. This is Google, they can certainly afford it – I'd be incredibly surprised if they weren't storing it.

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Having developed autonomous vehicles in a previous career, I can tell you that raw sensor data is far less useful than you think. By the time you are starting to hand over controls to the system itself you are pretty damn confident that your pipeline up to the control logic is all very solid.

Also, i'm not entirely sure what you think the costs involved in a test are? We purchased about 20 acres of land for a test track, but that was the only real expense involved in day to day development.

The true data rates (see my other posts) are most likely around 5-10 MB/s. Which is so low the benefits out weigh the costs. After all, what if their is an issue with the software? How are you going to reproduce without the logs, especially on a R&D system like Google has (yes it's still R&D, they can't even drive in the rain).

Your "true data rate" is completely wrong. You have no idea at what frequency they are converting analog to digital signals. You don't know for sure they are using off the shelf sensors. Your ignoring data sources in your calculations like OBD from the ECU or even GPS and AGPS data. etc etc.

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