Forget about autonomy for now. There is no proper legislation for their use quite yet.While I agree with you on much of what you say, I do take some issue with the concept of autonomy. Tesla has stated several times that they could have easily done the cross country demonstration as much as a year ago if they had simply programmed the route. This would, however, create a false positive among the public. By your analysis then they could have reaped the benefits of such a demonstration long ago but instead they chose to go with the bigger picture rather than mislead the public into believing the system was "ready". I feel like the news of the new Tesla chip is huge and along with the hardware updates scheduled to be implemented in the next few months could very well lead to full autonomy within the next two years.
As is the case with all of this, time will tell for sure.
Dan
(Simple question: who is at fault if AI makes an incident riding a wrong marked road?)
Google uses remote drivers for more reasons than people think.
Even when such technology will be ready it will take another few years for insurance,public laws, and population habits to catch the ride. It is a bomb, and of a thermonuclear type, but we are still in 1945.