Would you care to elaborate? Surely most of the lines of code are not directly implementing theoretical things, but I would say the meat of the work is without a doubt theoretical.
The estimate they gave me of the contribution of their control algorithms (the "theoretical" part of the project) to the over amount of effort getting the thing working was less than 1%.
Just because nobody has built a self-driving car before does not automatically make actually building one a theoretical exercise. The process is applying the sciences to making a car do something, which is very practical. Your awesome sort algorithm and the paper explaining it is theoretical. My implementation of it is practical.
That is the differentiation that most people can't see.