Right. Jokes aside, though, they did have self-driving cars in the 80s:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/alv/www/If you scroll down to the PhD theses names, there are some pretty well-known names that defended their dissertations as a part of the NavLab development.
(The Second) Grand Challenge, of course, was 2005. If I remember right, vehicles didn't have to deal with other road users until 2007 (Urban Challenge).
