[Hydraulix989]

"Also to be clear the driver assist features seen on cars like the model s are not what most people are referring to when they talk about self driving cars here."

Just saw your edit/addition, so I'm going to add more as well:

When did I even conflate them -- even if the state of the art is actually "driver assist" as you've described?

Google’s self-driving cars aren’t “fully autonomous”. Without human drivers, they’d lose control approximately every 1,500 miles, according to Google’s own reports.

Can you guess how many driverless miles their "self-driving cars" have driven?

Hint: It's zero.

If you're curious, here is an example of a much more grounded academic talk (read: not a TED talk) from 2015 by a renowned (in the autonomous vehicle research community) Boston (not California) researcher who worked with Thrun that corroborates the issues I've mentioned earlier:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs