[ghaff]

I'm by no means an expert but a number of years ago I saw a presentation by MIT's John Leonard (he was involved in one of the early DARPA contests). One of the interesting things he showed was dash cam footage he had taken over the course of about a week commuting from Brookline where he lived to MIT. And he pointed out all the things that would be really difficult to do.

As a non-expert but a very longtime driver this made an awful lot of sense to me. But so much money and brains were saying success was right around the corner that I was half-convinced that I and other skeptics were missing something.

I think, in addition to the scammers and dumb money, it's just that a lot of people who should have known better just looked at the pace of advance over the previous 5+ years and figured "How could we not iron out the remaining kinks in a few more?" Add to that the number of people who don't like cars much and just so desperately wanted this future where they never needed to own a car or drive again.