I agree on that. I personally think AI (and especially topics like deep learning) only makes up for a small part of autonomous driving or driver assistance in general. The remaining parts will be lots of old-fashioned control theory, signal-processing, general good software engineering practices, having a good software and system architecture, being able to build a fully deterministic (hard-realtime capable) system. For the latter topics a highly experienced person with more of an engineering background would be a better fit than a researcher with with a mostly-algorithm background.