No, it's not.

"It seems odd that self driving cars have been skipping this step." is an opinion referencing well-known current events. You can't expect everyone commenting on this article to re-reference the saga of Cruise in San Francisco; especially when it's frequently covered on the front page of Hacker News.

Furthermore, you should know that a Hacker News discussion is not Wikipedia. These discussions are not the kind of things where every off-the-cuff statement needs to be backed up with references.

I have doubts about this too. I remember seeing a Humvee autonomously driving around the CMU campus back in 1998. I get the feeling research institutions and, now, product companies have been working closely with local city governments about safely releasing these into the wild for some time.