It seems impossible that they could have it be fully autonomous to the point of not needing a steering wheel though. You can tell an autonomous car "take me to the mall", or "pull out of the garage", but there are so many edge cases that seem like they would still require manual control.

How do you tell it which spot to pick in a parking garage? Or how do you tell it to, say, drive on to a lift while inside a building with no GPS reception? It seems like they must still have some kind of manual controls: even if they somehow implement full autonomy, and take care of all the edge cases, and get past the regulatory hurdles...people just like to drive cars sometimes.

So I could believe you're right, and they have massively improved autonomous driving features, but to me that still doesn't quite explain his comments about the steering controls being massively different and "feeling like a spaceship".