I am willing to bet that even when driverless taxis are operating in at least 50% of big cities around the world, you will still see comments like "auto driving is a pipe dream like NFT" on HN every other day.
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.
Have we ever observed revolutionary change in tech which ran contrary to evolutionary change?
This seems like such an odd thing to expect will just "happen". Any other world-changing or impressive tech I'm familiar with has evolved to its current state over time, it's not like when Jobs announced the iPhone and changed the game there wasn't decades of mobile computing whose shoulders it stood on. Are you talking about something like crypto?
It's admittedly a bit confusing what you're asking for here.
What did Musk's promised driverless taxis provide that existing driverless taxis don't? The tech has arrived; it's a car that drives itself while the passenger sits in the back. Is the "gotcha" that the car isn't a Tesla?
He promised that you'd be able to turn your own Tesla into an autonomous taxi that would earn you money.
That is a massive lie, not splitting hairs.
Obviously, we're very desensitized to lying rats - but that's what he did.
Looks like it's still in the works. Sometimes when technologists promise something their timelines end up being overly optimistic. I'm sure this isn't news to you.
By your language and past commentary though this seems like the kind of thing which elicits a pretty emotional response from you, so I'm not sure this would be a productive conversation either way.