[jrussino]

I worked on a team at NREC that was building self-driving trucks for use in surface mines. The project was a descendant of CMU's work on the DARPA Grand/Urban Challenges. These vehicles actually went into production and are being used at a few mining sites around the world. Most of that team is now at Uber.

I can tell you that there is absolutely substance here. I have no idea what's going on inside Uber, but they have a group of people there (some of the only ones in the world) with experience building actual production-worthy fully-autonomous ground vehicles.

Having a safety driver in place during development and testing is common practice, and for sure they're still very much in the development and testing phase. Full autonomy on public roads is a harder problem that full autonomy in a more controlled environment like a mine site, for reasons that have discussed here and elsewhere, and I don't know how much progress they have made in dealing with those challenges. However, I have no doubt that they are working toward the goal of a fully-autonomous no-driver vehicle, not just the type of assisted-driving features you may have already seen in production.