(tongue firmly in cheek) Material science breakthrough could result in aircraft that flap wings that could compete with condors too, but what would be the point? Naturally evolved mechanism are not the gold standard; they developed under completely different constraints.
Flapping bird robot
Ornithopters have a long history[1] - but I meant "aircraft" at the scale of passenger jets.
This isn't really the point, it's that humans are able to successfully build an accurate-enough model of the world to navigate terrain with only camera like vision -- and a really bad one at that.
There is, of course, no problem with giving cars more sensory abilities to make them safer but what they mean by a crutch is that the CS breakthrough that will make self-driving cars compete with humans will function about as well with two crappy cameras mounted on the drivers seat as it would with an array of high-precision sensors.