This kind of hypocrisy only exists in a made up person. Anyone who is saying that autonomous vehicles are still a ways away are not taking about the very impressive but very much semi-autonomous vehicles deployed today. But instead vehicles that have no need for a human operator ever. The kind you could buy off the shelf, switch into taxi mode, and let it do its thing.

Semi-autonomous vehicles are impressive for the fact that one driver can now scale well beyond a single vehicle. Fully-autonomous vehicles are impressive because they can scale limitlessly. The former is evolutionary, the latter is revolutionary.