It's not just a matter of hardware. People didn't really know how to train neural networks more than 1-2 layers deep at the time. This is also before convolutional neural networks were invented by LeCun.

This network is literally 30x32 pixels => two NN layers => steering decisions. No convolution, no semantic segmentation. It's a very cool technical demonstration, but we've come a long way since, on every front.

...and apparently it still took a good amount of time to train.

If you dig enough thru the various papers and such written about ALVIIN, you'll find links to older projects, and a couple of "follow on" ones as well.

One of the earlier projects that (I believe) led to ALVINN was the CMU Terragator - this was a custom 6-wheel chassis about the size of a large quad-cycle that was designed to navigate around the CMU campus. It was basically a testing platform for autonomous vehicle technologies. IIRC, this was around 1984 or so.

After the Terragator, but prior to ALVINN (and ultimately led to the funding for ALVIIN) there was a project to develop a radio-controlled vehicle that could navigate through an unstructured environment (a cluttered alleyway, IIRC) called "DAVE".

These projects and more are all referenced in the NVidia End-to-End CNN paper.

Yes, agreed. Software had also not advanced sufficiently.

Another project, with comparable design and objectives was EUREKA PROMETHEUS Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project), which lead to "VaMP": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaMP

From the article: In 1994, the VaMP and its twin VITA-2 were stars of the final international presentation of the PROMETHEUS project in October 1994 on Autoroute 1 near the Charles-de-Gaulle airport in Paris. With a safety driver and guests on board, the twins drove more than 1000 km in normal traffic on the three-lane highway at speeds up to 130 km/h. They demonstrated lane changes left and right, autonomously passing other cars after maneuver approval by the safety driver.

One year later, the autonomous Mercedes-Benz drove more than 1,000 miles (2,000 km) from Munich to Copenhagen and back in traffic at up to 180 km/h, again planning and executing maneuvers to pass other cars with safety driver approval. However, only in a few critical situations (such as unmodeled construction areas) a safety driver took over completely. Again, active computer vision was used to deal with rapidly changing street scenes. The car achieved speeds exceeding 175 km/h on the German Autobahn, with a mean distance between human interventions of 9 km. Despite being a research system without emphasis on long distance reliability, it drove up to 158 km without any human intervention.

Not too shabby for the 90s I'd say.