[detaro]

If they designed it as that from the start while promoting it as an open-world, they made a serious judgement error, as cbozeman explained. If you promote an open world with cars, you need cars that act believable.

If they attempted to have it be a believable feature of the game world, it's apparently entirely lost on consumers (e.g. a world with stupid cars could be explained in an interesting way as one where only few exceptions actually drive themselves, whereas most just rely on stupid automations taking care of it - but you need to present that in a way people understand).

Some of the things people found also indicates that a few systems like this actually exist but are only triggered very rarely, which suggests they were intended to be there but disabled because they don't work well enough/don't scale.