Practically ALL course introductory materials that regard robotics and AI that I've seen began with "you might imagine a talking bipedal humanoid when you hear the word `robot`, but perhaps the most commonplace robot that you have seen is a vending machine", with the illustration of a typical 80s-90s outdoor soda vendor with no apparent moving parts.

So "maybe cars are a bit of robots too" is more like 30-50 years behind the time.