This kind of hypocrisy only exists in a made up person. Anyone who is saying that autonomous vehicles are still a ways away are not taking about the very impressive but very much semi-autonomous vehicles deployed today. But instead vehicles that have no need for a human operator ever. The kind you could buy off the shelf, switch into taxi mode, and let it do its thing.
Semi-autonomous vehicles are impressive for the fact that one driver can now scale well beyond a single vehicle. Fully-autonomous vehicles are
impressive because they can scale limitlessly. The former is evolutionary, the latter is revolutionary.
Have we ever observed revolutionary change in tech which ran contrary to evolutionary change?
This seems like such an odd thing to expect will just "happen". Any other world-changing or impressive tech I'm familiar with has evolved to its current state over time, it's not like when Jobs announced the iPhone and changed the game there wasn't decades of mobile computing whose shoulders it stood on. Are you talking about something like crypto?
It's admittedly a bit confusing what you're asking for here.
Semi-autonomous vehicles are impressive for the fact that one driver can now scale well beyond a single vehicle. Fully-autonomous vehicles are impressive because they can scale limitlessly. The former is evolutionary, the latter is revolutionary.