Autonomous Driving - What's the Commonality?

I started to work on autonomous driving actually in the late 90s. And that was doing my PhD work in northern Germany when I had to automate endurance testing for Volkswagen. Vehicles 20 years ago did not have what is called electronic actuators. All these things didn't exist 20 years ago and ESP was just introduced. So we first had to build a robot to sit on the driver's seat with three legs for the three pedals, an arm for the gear shifter, another arm for the steering wheel.