I don't understand why they need this. Tesla has been selling fully-autonomous cars with L5 automation for years. They totally cracked self driving cars back in

I don't understand why they need this. Tesla has been selling fully-autonomous cars with L5 automation for years. They totally cracked self driving cars back in 2016, to the extent that "the person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons", and have had 1,000,000 fully autonomous robotaxis on the road since 2020. What work remains to be done? Still, it is good to see powerful hardware being put to good use for once. I understand it is silly to feel sorry for inanimate objects, but it saddens me to see silicon squandered by some manchild at a national lab working on a dead-end vanity project when it could be crunching numbers for Tesla or—better yet—mining Bitcoin.