You are wrong. And the "serious autonomous teams" are also wrong in not using AI (which is mostly true AFAIK, as long as we don't call basic image recognition to already be "AI").

But that's just because the AI we currently have - basically idiot-savants made of silicon - is mostly useless to them, since the kind of AI they would need for actual, 100%, no-compromise level 5 self driving capabilities hasn't been invented yet, nor does anyone have a promising idea as to how to invent one.

I am pretty sure that the only way to actually reach this goal requires a full-blown AGI. Because what we call "driving" and what is often misunderstood as a rather mundane and repetitive mechanical operation of machinery governed by a few simple ground rules is actually an insanely complex task that requires several higher-level capabilities of the human intelligence: besides pattern recognition, quick evaluations of situations with an unbounded number of variables and application of knowledge and concepts to an unlimited number of ever-new traffic situations it requires foresight, communication (of the difficult nonverbal kind) and sometimes even carefully dosed brazenness - to know when rules should better be ignored or bent instead of followed.