Well I was a little confused on that point. I think that it is a kind of stitching but maybe not at the overlapping pixel level the level the way many stitching algorithms work. Note that Karpathy made a point that it's essential for them to calibrate out the slight alignment variances in each car (he made the amusing comment "all of our cars are slightly cockeyed, in a slightly different way") and he did say the images are "stitched up").
I would certainly agree that more overlap, and less distorted distorted overlap, would help a lot in in creating the continuous panoramic view more quickly and confidently. And I've been a big proponent of more and better camera angles. However it's also true that our brains are very talented at filling in a world view from fairly distorted and low-resolution peripheral vision, based on anchor objects rather than a meshing 9f fine-grained detail. So in the NN, It may not be a case of being presented with a nicely stitched 360 video feed, hut rather a poorly-stitched and and somewhat imperfect panorama that still contains the elements necessary to extract the needed features.
on Twitter are weary of debating the camera issue:
