In 2017 Google said the cars would be available in months according to the article.
Last year Elon Musk said there would be 1mm robo taxis by the end of 2020.
These corporations leverage the public's lack of understanding to spin a tale to investors and the market. Then, this tale got co-opted by politicians like Andrew Yang who say 4 million truckers will be out of work in 5-10 years, so we need to vote for him + UBI to protect us from the threat of AI in the future.
The view I take is that planes have pilots for a variety of reasons, many of which are not related directly to controlling a plane's path. We have 30 years of data on flight and flights have fewer inputs to analyze, yet we still keep pilots around because of the added sense of security and the utility pilots serve on edge cases.
I think self driving cars will be very similar and the future where no one drives probably will not exist for a long time.
Another thing I find interesting, the retort most bring to driverless cars is that they will prevent needless deaths, but say for example America has 40,000 deaths due to car crashes per year, and 20,000 are preventable, but autonomous vehicles malfunctioning causes 10,000 deaths. So a net result of 30,000 deaths with autonomous cars. In terms of death the result is positive, but now you are relinquishing control over your experience. Someone with excellent driving skills, who never drinks and drives, and who follows the speed limit, faces a way lower risk of death driving. However, self driving cars introduce new risks to that individual, and for that reason I do not I believe the optimal combination for drivers will be the same as for pilots: machinery + individual control.