If other robots I've worked with (eg. the PR2) are any indication... 1GB/sec. is probably on the low end for the total data throughput. The PR2 had a high-res camera (GigE?), quad stereo cams in head (narrow and wide FoV), dual "wrist" cameras, a Kinect (usually), dual Hokuyo UTM LRF's, full 14+ DoF kinematics at 1KHz, and lots and lots of diagnostic info (eg. "heartbeat", system diagnostics, localization signals, IMUs, etc).
Granted, we didn't log all that data all the time, but TL;DR: I wouldn't nitpick over a factor of 8 based on your own calculations.
That was an upper bound to show the absurdity of his non sourced "fact". The reality is much lower because the main sensor is the Velodyne, and it only produces 5-6MB/s. The primary focus of his picture is the Velodyne point cloud. Which he says is "1 GB per second" which is 100 times larger than it really is.
I have worked on several fully autonomous vehicle projects based on Velodynes and their processing and logging rates are around of 5-20MB/ (as you would expect) so seeing someone quote "1 GB/s" is pretty awful.
Wow, never thought about that in the Google Car context. To be fair, I dislike driving in heavy rain myself, and most people drive much slower in such conditions. Still, that might be more of an issue in rainy Hamburg compared to the Bay Area ...
It's also not officially water proof. That said, we used ours in light rain a few times and nothing bad happened to it. The data was pretty much useless however (although determining that was a large part of the point of the experiment).
Granted, we didn't log all that data all the time, but TL;DR: I wouldn't nitpick over a factor of 8 based on your own calculations.