Let's take a look at some of those realistic timelines. A quick googling gave me a very helpful listicle by VentureBeat from 2017, titled Self-driving car timeline for 11 top automakers. [1]

Some examples:

Ford - Level 4 vehicle in 2021, no gas pedal, no steering wheel, and the passenger will never need to take control of the vehicle in a predefined area.

Honda - production vehicles with automated driving capabilities on highways sometime around 2020

Toyta - Self-driving on the highway by 2020

Renault-Nissan - 2020 for the autonomous car in urban conditions, probably 2025 for the driverless car

Volvo - It’s our ambition to have a car that can drive fully autonomously on the highway by 2021.

Hyundai - We are targeting for the highway in 2020 and urban driving in 2030.

Daimler - large-scale commercial production to take off between 2020 and 2025

BMW - highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021

Tesla - End of 2017

It certainly wasn't just Tesla who was promising self-driving cars any second now. Tesla was definitely the most agressive, but failed to meet its goals just like every other manufacturer.

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[1] https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/04/self-driving-car-timeline...

There was definitely a period when everyone (for certain values of same) felt they needed to get into a game of topper with increasingly outlandish claims. Because if they didn't people on, say, forums like this one (and more importantly the stock market) would see them as hopelessly behind.

Wow they all really got suckered by the AI grifters didn't they?

Self-driving cars are common in Europe for decades. We just use the less cool term "subway" for them.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. :)

Subways are common worldwide.

In fact, the first (practical) one was in Boston; not in Europe.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. ;)

London and Budapest had subways before Boston did. So did some other cities depending on which list you look at.

So what made Boston’s later entry the first “practical” one?

[Edit] Or do you mean self-driving subways? Does Boston have one already? A quick Googling suggests the opposite:

https://whdh.com/news/mbta-officials-considering-self-drivin...

Sure, but are they self driving?

A number of european capitals seem to have managed to do driverless high capacity underground trains. Here in the UK, we've got a number of automated trains but for union reasons they still have drivers in the cab who press go at each station.

In the US, it looks like Detroit has a self driving line, and there are a bunch of airport shuttles. Presumably you are hitting the same union issues as us?

Let's not dismiss the point that self-driving cars are the "stone soup" of machine learning industry. Like the monk who claimed he could make soup with just a stone, machine learning claimed that with two cameras, two microphones, and steering/brake/accelerator control, a machine would someday soon drive just like a human can with that hardware equivalent.

Then it turned out well, we actually need a lot more cameras. Now we need high res microphones. Now we need magnets embedded in the road. Now we need highly accurate GPS maps. Now we need high power LIDAR that damages other cameras on the road. Now we need....

Each little ingredient in the soup "made only with a stone." Machine learning has utterly failed to deliver on this original promise of learning to operate a vehicle like a person, with no more sensors than a person.

"Machine learning has utterly failed to deliver on this original promise of learning to operate a vehicle like a person, with no more sensors than a person."

I am not aware of anyone except Musk making that claim. "Machine learning" as in the statements of the main researchers, certainly did not promise anything like it.

The problem for self driving cars is the risk tolerance. No one cares if a deep fake tool fails once every 100,000 hours because it results in a sub standard video instead of someone dying.