Did anyone else expect that self-driving cars would be so much easier than natural language?

I have always expected computers that were as able to navigate a car to a typical real-world destination as an average human driver to be easier to build than computers that were as able to manage a typical real-world conversation as an average human native speaker.

That said, there's a huge range of goalposts in the realm of "natural language", some of which I expected to be a lot easier than they seem to be.