1. Make some thing that work in very limited of amount of real world cases
2. Deploy it somewhere where it won't encounter things it won't handle.
3. Market the shit out of the above fact and how well it work there.
4. Let the naive population who have a tendency to take one look, and imagine how it will automatically progress to some arbitrary influx point.
5. Get a lot of funding from people in point 4 and feed it to point 3, and keep going.
Why couldn’t this trick be pulled off two decades ago?
After all autonomous vehicles has been well funded research since the 1980s the DARPA grand challenge being one of the previously most important benchmarks.
I think you might just need a history lesson friend