Freeway driving is much, much easier than in-town roads - there's been successful autonomous freeway driving since the 90s.
When you drive on the freeway, everyone's going the same way (or at least you'd hope), the configuration of the road is well known, lines are consistent, etc. It's all the little things that need to be accounted for - opposing traffic, pedestrians, parked cars, random obstacles, and any number of other road, traffic and obstacle configurations that exist, that make consistently and safely driving elsewhere difficult for autonomous systems.
Because some consenting adults have a lot more power than other consenting adults, and that results in exploitation that we shouldn't abide in a moral, modern country. A huge international corporation versus an individual who will be homeless if they can't come up with a few hundred bucks for rent soon - do you think the negotiation between them would be reasonable?
The root cause of all of this is the abysmal safety net in the US. If vitally important things like healthcare, unemployment and disability weren't tied to your employment, then there wouldn't be an issue in the first place because companies couldn't weasel their way out of paying for it by calling employees "contractors".
If something's broken or if someone needs some info/action to be unblocked, I want a notification. I'm less likely to check email for something time sensitive, but I sure as hell don't want 20 phone calls a day.
Can't really determine if I actually have time for something before I know what it is. And unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of just ignoring things I don't want to deal with.
Until there exists 100% clean options for the entire pipeline of resource extraction, transport, assembly, distribution, etc., there will still be fossil fuel involvement in 'clean energy generation'. Can't really make clean energy cleanly unless we have clean energy to make it in the first place.
Resource extraction / recycling is a whole other issue of course.
When you drive on the freeway, everyone's going the same way (or at least you'd hope), the configuration of the road is well known, lines are consistent, etc. It's all the little things that need to be accounted for - opposing traffic, pedestrians, parked cars, random obstacles, and any number of other road, traffic and obstacle configurations that exist, that make consistently and safely driving elsewhere difficult for autonomous systems.