In other words, they could ship "now" if they weren't doing such a revolutionary product. If you make a trivially incremental improvement on an already-existing product (iPad3) then that's a lot easier
Does a driverless car even count as basic research that they can spin off into a consumer product?
If they can get such vehicles legal and available to the general public in California, it will be legal everywhere else within a year or two at most. California sets or has had the ability to set a lot of standards for the country, from vehicle emissions, textbooks, to now, apparently, driverless cars.
A driverless car is not just another car. It's not a fancy smartphone. It's a paradigm shift that will reshape society and erase tens of thousands of jobs in a relatively short timeframe. And it's one of the rare cases where you can actually predict and quantify these consequences with relatively good accuracy.
I'd assume quite a few parties (read: all of them) will want to have a say in such a rollout, beyond technical peculiarities. For the better or the worse.
Like the "paradigm shift" that was to be the Segway, what problem does this solve exactly?
Airplanes fly constantly, because each second they're on the ground is a second they're not paying for their capital cost. Ever see how barren a 6 lane highway is at 3am in the morning on a weeknight?
In the mean time, isn't it prudent to have intermediate products? Products to help people get used to the idea of driverless vehicles? Products to give them experience on how to rollout their bigger vision?