In the race to build a functional autonomous vehicle some companies are getting it done, and others, in spite of big promises, several years of effort, and scaled, well capitalized operations have very little to show for their efforts.
Everybody still has a lot of work to do, but the operations that can, at the very least, demonstrate as proof of concept their cars handling just a few miles of of uninterrupted driving in dynamic environments have cleared the biggest hurdle. Following that big hurdle is the validation process, which is tens of thousands of smaller hurdles stretching out as far as the eye can see, but so long as they've cleared the first, biggest hurdles, you can be reasonably confident they'll get to a minimum viable product eventually so long as they keep at it.
I have confidence in Waymo, GM, and Zoox. With everyone else it's either too soon to tell, or I don't have enough information, or they're sucking:
So if you're looking for CV/ML people working on the perception part of the stack, look there.
FWIW, I work in this field now and I have fairly low confidence in the non-ML parts of the software stack across the industry. There's a lot more to this problem than well manicured computer-vision demos, and Volvo is a lot less cavalier about loss of human life than almost anyone else, so it's fairly heartening to see them realign around realistic expectations.
Where have the results of their experiments been published such that you feel confident in stating that?
In the meantime, business executives and media work hand-in-hand to try and hype everything and promising stuff which cannot be delivered in a short amount of time.