If that's true, I'm fairly sure that he:

1. Should not have told you that.

2. Is not happy about you saying something about it.

This leads me to believe that you don't actually know this person.

Even if this were true (which, I'm skeptical about), just because they have autonomous hardware and a "self-driving car team", doesn't mean that's the product that they will put on the field.

Look at it this way. If you're building a software platform for autonomous vehicles, then you're going to need to do some (or a lot) of R&D in autonomous hardware, but that doesn't necessarily mean that autonomous hardware is the ultimate product.