Self-driving is not going to be solved by throwing money at it. If it was, Google would have "solved" it already and Apple wouldn't have abandoned their effort.

The obvious shortage is engineering talent. This is more debatable (many people, like Elon Musk, don't believe this to be the case), but the field also needs one or more research breakthroughs, especially in the realm of planning and reasoning. Most of the machine learning in self-driving cars goes towards perception / detection / mapping. The actual decision-making is still heuristics and hard-coded rules.