That must have been what people thought in 1994/1995 at the final presentation of PROMETHEUS:
"The first was the final presentation of the PROMETHEUS project in October 1994 on Autoroute 1 near the airport Charles-de-Gaulle in Paris. With guests on board, the twin vehicles of Daimler-Benz (VITA-2) and UniBwM (VaMP) drove more than 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) on the three-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 kilometres per hour (81 mph). Driving in free lanes, convoy driving with distance keeping depending on speed, and lane changes left and right with autonomous passing have been demonstrated; the latter required interpreting the road scene also in the rear hemisphere. Two cameras with different focal lengths for each hemisphere have been used in parallel for this purpose."[1]
How could you not expect all cars to drive autonomously in the year 2000 at the latest if we were already so far? Everything else was just a bit of doing, right? Unfortunately, sometimes we don't know what we don't know, so things may seem "just around the corner" when they are many years away.
It is hard to be so pessimistic when you see cars driving autonomously daily.
> How exactly does an autonomous car deal with that aspect of human nature?
Aren’t we already collecting lots of data about this?