People are bullish on them because they don't need to get anywhere near that bar to be useful. A car that can drive itself only on well maintained freeways during the day in good weather is still incredibly useful.
All we've seen so far is tarted-up driver assist systems that sometimes suddenly decide they don't want to be in control anymore, killing the actual driver or whoever happens to be unlucky enough to be in front of the vehicle.
It's all hype.
The problem is too difficult to solve with current technology without drastically changing the roads and removing humans altogether.
Rio Tinto was able to get it working with a drastically limited scope on closed roads with infinite money.
>Autonomous haul trucks are operated by a supervisory system and a central controller, rather than a driver. They use pre-defined GPS courses to automatically navigate haul roads and intersections and to know actual locations, speeds and directions of other vehicles at all times.
