Still, the 300,000 years figure is way off. That's an anatomically modern human and they most likely could be trained to operate a car much like a human of toda

Still, the 300,000 years figure is way off. That's an anatomically modern human and they most likely could be trained to operate a car much like a human of today can. Getting to that point took billions of years, but producing the driver of a car was never the goal of that process. It's just the wrong way to look at the problem. You're not trying to develop the generic system that can learn how to drive a car, you're trying to develop the specific system that can safely drive a car occupied by humans, naturally employing machine learning. I would argue that we're 95% there, but solving those last 5% is exponentially more expensive, but not commensurately more valuable. There's a "profit ceiling" imposed by the cost of a human driver, which appeats to make solving the problem economically intractable.