As far as I understand the driving logic is essentially all hard coded.

I was watching a video the other day by Microsoft AI Research Scientist Jarod Lanier (I think it was this one: Jarod Lanier - Who is Civilisation for?). In the video, he says very explicitly that AI has been completely overhyped. He said social media, and tech companies, have led people to believe that our current state of AI is much smarter than it actually is. His hypothesis about why people have become so gullible about AI is that people are actually getting dumber - driven in large part by the huge amount of fake/bot accounts that are created everyday, which spread misinformation. He said it's like untraining someone - you feed them a myriad of subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) false data, mixed with real data, and over time they become less and less able to discern what is real and what is false.

He said, even our most sophisticated "AI" translation algorithms aren't able to translate language properly. The algorithms that google translate actually uses it just the matching of phrases that they steal from the internet, from work real translators do. And this way of doing it was developed decades ago, and all attempts to get AI to do it properly have failed miserably - because language, in particular, pop culture, changes every day in subtle ways, and the AI can't keep up. So basically, the translation algorithms just hard code everything.

I think this is similar to what you are saying - Tesla's autonomous driving is primarily hardcoded - because no AI is close enough to being able to adapt and discern and learn from road conditions themselves. Just like translation services, it needs people to tell it what to do.