Just pattern recognition it is not the neural net everyone assumes it is.
Tesla’s current iteration of self-driving is based on neural networks. Certainly the computer vision is; there’s no other way we have of doing computer vision that works at all well and, according to this article from last year it’s true for the decision-making too.
Of course, the whole task of self-driving is “pattern recognition”; neural networks are just one way of achieving that.
We have gone from cruise control to cars being able to drive themselves quite well in about a decade. The last percentage points of reliability are of course the hardest, but that’s a tremendously pessimistic take.