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

I was very surprised. I had been using Google Translate and before that Babel Fish for years, and expected them to slowly incrementally improve as they kept on doing; self-driving cars, on the other hand, had essentially no visible improvement to me in the 1990s and the 2000s essentially up to the second DARPA challenge where (to me) they did the proverbial '0 to 60'.