the main reason driverless cars haven’t taken off in Europe is that European road safety regulators require strong evidence that a technology is safe before it is used on roads, as opposed to the US, where new technology is largely allowed on roads by default until it kills enough people.

GDPR doesn’t prevent you making a recording as a private citizen of a public space on a local device in the car with a 1 week rolling buffer.

of the GDPR barrier

Well, not spying on people is also an option

Regulating in a manner to ban them. Driverless cars are not technologically ready right now. GDPR, is the bare minimum privacy protection, as a lot o citizens required.