Are those not two different kinds of models though? For self-driving cars, the most important city models and those to which the Ford CEO was referring would surely be high-precision records of the physical layout of the city. Whereas the models in the article are simulating how people / cars / ... move around the city.
Hackett said the city models were likely to be slowly-changing stuff.
Human drivers also gather data from nearby vehicles. That's the point of brake lights, turn signals, and rearview mirrors, for example. And, yes, human drivers also spoof that data: mostly by forgetting to use those signals correctly.
The ideal is a high precision representation and then let that each model use what it requires. Better aggregated than extrapolated. This is the central idea of our modeling platform at Aimsun.
