You know the 80/20 problem? The last 20% percent of the work require 80% of the effort? Well, with self-driving cars it's the reverse. Most start ups spend the first year getting a team of car hackers to hook up a bunch of ROS machines in the trunk to the car's controls and rigging up a bunch of sensors. And then once they're done, they have this one task left, writing the actual algorithms. And they realize that the best they can do is a car that makes laps around their parking lot (see above article), and even that takes them another year.