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In most cars, the "black boxes" are completely integrated with the available safety systems (airbags, belt tensioners, brake assist, stability control, etc.). All of those devices need to have data about speed, steering angle, and so on.
At some point, certain manufacturers realized that all of this data that the car was already gathering would be a very useful way of getting (almost) free research about real-world crashes. So the "black box" was invented as something that will store the last few seconds of data after an accident. This has presumably helped engineers to better understand how to make cars safer.
I am not aware of any system that records more than a few a seconds worth of information. There wouldn't be any point in keeping track of average speed, etc. A possible exception to this would be in cars with adaptive automatic transmissions, but I've never heard about data being extracted from those.
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