Autonomous ride services are operating commercially in a growing number of cities. That has led to reasonable confusion about when a personally owned car will do the same thing.
They are different problems, and the second is substantially harder.
What a service can constrain
A robotaxi operates in a defined area, mapped in detail, in weather within known limits, on roads the operator has characterised. It can decline to serve a route. It can stop operating in conditions it handles poorly.
It also has remote operators who can intervene, and a maintenance regime that checks sensors continuously.
What a private car cannot
Refuse to drive where its owner wants to go. A car sold as self-driving has to handle any road the owner points it at, in whatever weather, with sensors that have not been cleaned in months.
That is a fundamentally larger problem, and it is why every credible deployment so far has been a service.
The liability question
If a car drives itself and causes harm, who is responsible. Manufacturers have been unwilling to accept that liability broadly, and until someone does, systems will be sold as driver assistance requiring supervision.
The legal framing determines the product more than the technology does.
What you actually get
Increasingly capable assistance. Motorway driving with supervision, automated parking, emergency intervention. These are genuinely useful and are not autonomy.
The naming has been actively misleading, and that has cost lives where drivers believed the marketing over the manual.
A realistic expectation
Services expanding city by city. Private vehicles gaining capability within defined conditions, clearly bounded, for a long time yet.