Belief is not important to a scientist even though everyone has some beliefs. What is important is what can be demonstrated to occur.
The method of science is that someone makes what they believe is a discovery or an improvement in some area and they publish their results along with enough information to others to try to replicate their results.
Some here may recall the publication of a process for cold fusion by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01673-x
The short story is that they believed that they had discovered a way to get fusion at room temperature and quickly published their report. The rest of the scientific community rapidly expressed their concerns and no one was able to replicate their results which were ultimately put down to experimental technique errors.
Plenty of criticism of the claim but no one descended to personal criticism of either the researchers or those who disagreed with their claim. This is the essence of the method of science.
Just this week we have seen a modern version
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-...ares/101950476
Google was in a rush to announce a new AI and came a little unstuck when it failed to meet a simple test. Google is obviously going to improve its performance and it may very well become important but the method of science will be applied to them and anyone else and they will always be expected to prove their claims.
So let it be with automated cars and anything else, if you cannot show that you have got it right then the world should not be criticized for pointing out that the results do not match the claim.
As one of the articles in the original post points out there is no guarantee that we will ever have fully autonomous cars however much we might desire that. Many of us are old enough to possibly benefit from a fully automated car but wanting and believing do not produce such outcomes. The proof that it is possible is for the future and we all wait with interest.