Surprising indeed, but not entirely. Udacity co-founder Sebastian Thrun competed in the DARPA Grand Challenge, and led the development of Google's self-driving car.
Thrun is also a luminary in the field of AI and the head of Carnegie Mellon's CS dept
They offer a nanodegree [0], so I'm not really surprised they want to utilise that expertise (lecturers, engineers, anybody that helped build the coursework) in more than one way.
We've been building an open source self-driving car alongside providing an amazing self-driving car curriculum. We've found that the two equate to one of the best educational experiences on the planet!