It's my belief that self driving cars will, for a very significant time in the future, still need to make human control possible. Think about the vast amounts of rural roads -- dirt, gravel. Anyone who's ever taken a 4x4 out to a trailhead in the desert knows that sometimes those roads don't even exist except on a map. Washouts can be a weekly problem in certain seasons. But you don't start in the desert, right? You have to take highways at a minimum, and quite likely national interstates as well, to get to the desert roads.

Think about attending a festival or fair with grass parking. You follow a line of cars, pull up to a guy who's standing out in the field. He looks around and says, "Why don't you go park next to that red Toyota two rows over?" Sure, that part is not "on the road," but certainly I had to take highways to get there.

Maybe I, as an urban-dwelling American, only need functionality like this a few times per year. But there are significant chunks of this country and the world in general where this is part of daily life. Adopting fully self-driving cars without manual driving modes is going to take extreme amounts of change and adaptation, not only technologically but also culturally. I would recommend spending a few weeks in the deep country if you want to fully understand some of the difficulties in reaching level 5.

If the time scale you're talking about is on the order of 50 years, I could maybe see it. But I do think there will always be a need for personal vehicles with some level of manual control.

Beyond all that, however, this article to me seems like 90% clickbait. The statement merely was "Maybe it will never happen," and it was stated in the context of a discussion of the difficulty in reaching level 5 autonomy. But now we have articles throwing headlines up saying "VW Exec admits fully self driving cars may NEVER happen." Feels a little disingenuous.