Generalized self driving cars seems like such a hard problem, laced with a huge amount of hard to handle edge cases and a huge amount of hard to enumerate possible scenarios.

I think it will still happen, but they need to simplify the problem. The way to simplify it is to create automated driving lanes, similar to the current HOV lanes, that have standardized markers that are easy for computers to read, and then eventually extend it to automated driving routes.

That will take some amount of buy-in by the government to install, but I have faith in our well paid lobbyists.