New York looks like a well regulated army training course compared with somewhere like Cairo.

Never is a long time, but I don't see self driving cars coping well when traffic is coming the wrong way down the street, let alone when cars are driving along the sidewalk

Yes, Cairo will probably have self-driving cars over a decade after New York has them. But that doesn't mean self-driving cards aren't a commercially viable product before they work in Cairo. Very few technological innovations work better than the thing they replace in all circumstances initially. Back In The Day there were a lot of places a horse could go that a Model T couldn't but that didn't prevent cars from replacing horses.