Is anybody naive enough to think that these companies would give up on creating self-driving cars if they were not able to patent some of their technology? I do

Is anybody naive enough to think that these companies would give up on creating self-driving cars if they were not able to patent some of their technology? I don't think you can really even make the argument that patents, in this case, encourage innovation (across the industry - they do incentivize grabbing potentially useful patents as fast as possible for individual companies), nor that they benefit consumers.