Yeah, we have the tech now for cars to drive themselves. I used to work for a robotics company and we made a number of vehicles that could drive themselves safely (for the most part, anyway).
Anyway, the main thing keeping autonomous cars off the roads today is not some secret government conspiracy, but cost. We built a car for the Darpa Urban Challenge which was capable of driving safely in normal traffic conditions at speeds up to 40mph (and several of our engineers felt confident that it could have handled itself safely all the way up to around 100mph!) The final cost of the car was a little over 1.5Million dollars. A good portion of that cost went into the varied and *extremely* expensive sensors the car required. Our main sensor sensor alone cost about $600,000!
We don't need society to "be ready" for autonomous cars - we need mass production of parts which are currently very, very specialized and costly.