I worked for a while at an auto supplier (heavy vehicle like semis, buses, RVs, and military) in their test labs. The bean counting is real. I remember one test we had to do involved replacing a single bolt in a 200lb wheel assembly with one whose threads were 30% shorter and barely made it through the hole. It wasn't a clearance issue, per the PM and engineer, it was because shrinking that bolt saved half a penny per wheel end (or something small like that) and would put them under their targeted cost per unit, nevermind the hundreds of hours of testing that had to be run to validate the new assembly.

PMs are given a target price and a target cost. They will do everything in their power to get under it because their job depends on it. Those drives are going to be the bare minimum necessary for storing what they need to (not what they want to) and will likely have a very short lifespan overall.

It's publicly known that the Waymo Pacificas were using FPGAs and Xeons running Linux for their main compute, which generates most of the logs and processes the sensor data.

So given that context, how likely do you think it is that they're logging it all to terabytes of onboard flash?

But also, lifetime analysis is standard practice during the design phase.