Well, the discussion diverged from 'data that I generate by driving' to 'data being gathered by Google'. I wanted to add that post because of the latter discussion, as an addition to what flag said. There is not a lot of disagreement here - it's more that I think you miss some of the details of how this works.

It's not just the road, and it's not just your location that is being gathered, analysed and processed by companies like Google. The Atlantic post does a very good job of detailing that Google's car only works because Google has mapped every inch of the route the car will take. This goes way beyond just knowing where the road is - Google wants to collect as much as they can. They have developed algorithms to find not just street signs but also store signs, house numbers, trees, cars, people, children and others (I wrote about how I think that is a privacy issue, too).

Because the Google cars exchange information between them, it is very useful to know what car noticed what phenomena where, under what circumstances. They'd be foolish not to track every single one of their self-driving cars (note: from an engineering standpoint).

Google's strategy has always been to collect all information and to figure out what to do with it later. It's not just the certain information you mentioned - they actively want to collect everything. I mean, have you ever checked accounts.google.com? Collecting data about you is the default setting.