A local couple says their road purity campaign has proven self-driving cars are totally ready for everything by meticulously eliminating everything where self-driving cars aren’t ready.

DARIEN, CT — In a groundbreaking achievement that will surely revolutionize transportation forever, Jay and Gypsy Roberts have definitively proven that autonomous vehicles are ready for mass adoption by completing a cross-country drive that carefully avoided literally every challenging aspect of self-driving.

“If it isn’t a problem, it isn’t a problem, am I right? The faster we lower expectations the faster we achieve total success in everything that remains” said the couple about their engineering hack. “Just the other day I wrote an app by defining the outcome as writing an app. Easy.”

The visionary couple’s $1,000 aftermarket gadget successfully piloted their 2017 Prius for 99% of their journey by employing the brilliant strategy of never changing lanes, never driving in cities, never parking, never navigating construction zones, and carrying enough fuel to even avoid refueling — basically everything short of having the car delivered to their destination on a flatbed truck.

“Once we eliminate the need for fuel completely, we achieve another milestone in not driving. This reductivist purity proves our technology works while we are asking it to do less and less,” declared Roberts, apparently unaware that his methodology resembles a cooking show where the chef demonstrates making a perfect pizza by pulling a printed cardboard one out of the oven.

“We touched the wheel for less than 20 minutes out of 38 hours, which is basically full autonomy of everything other than the parts where someone would need to actually drive. We expect to be able to plan a successful trip to Mars next, where we don’t actually survive.”

The automotive press hailed this as a triumph of engineering, much like declaring that submarines are seaworthy because they work great underwater as long as deadly implosion at depth isn’t reported as a failure.

Tech journalists nationwide rushed to proclaim this the dawn of the autonomous age, apparently forgetting that most humans need to do things like park to sit on a toilet (instead of gaming a weakly regulated competition by starving yourself and wearing a diaper at 90mph on flat, straight Interstate highways).

Industry experts praised the couple’s innovative approach to defining autonomous concepts as systematically removing every capability that would define autonomy.

“It’s genius,” said one analyst who requested anonymity because he was laughing too hard to be quoted. “Why invest in solving hard problems when you can just declare success immediately for cosmetics? It’s like proving you’re ready to swim across the English channel by perfecting backstrokes in the bathtub.”

The breakthrough comes at a perfect time for the autonomous vehicle industry, which has spent billions of dollars and decades of development time struggling with issues like “stopping” and “changing lanes.”

By simply avoiding scenarios in a high speed single lane for days, the Roberts team has rendered the whole discipline of engineering obsolete.

“We knew we needed to get our numbers down on human intervention, so we decided the fastest way was to install a clock with complex wiring and costumes for humans to generate a lower number than last year. We took a big number and made a device that produces a smaller number. Can’t argue with that.”

“This is the future of transportation,” explained one venture capitalist while frantically typing a $50 million investment proposal for highway-only leftmost lane cars that require professional delivery to and from the highway’s left lane. “Why waste time and money solving complex urban driving challenges when you can just tell customers to move to the absolute middle of nowhere and never refuel?”

The inspirational success and media attention has inspired copycat entrepreneurs across Silicon Valley.

One startup has announced plans for autonomous cooking that opens wrappers, while another promises revolutionary autonomous surgery that achieves 100% success rates by only curing perfectly healthy patients.

Meanwhile, traditional automakers continue their wasteful pursuit of developing systems in real-world driving conditions, apparently unaware that the American ingenuity is in redefining what “driving” means.

“Sure, someone else invented the lightbulb and not Edison, but think of how Edison removed light as a requirement by having them burn out far more often. He lowered the bar of success and made fortunes. Genius, right there. Edison’s revolution to make lights that couldn’t reliably produce light are foundational our inexpensive self-driving tools that won’t reliably drive.”

Sources report engineers at major manufacturers are saying they realize now they could have just programmed cars to not move at all as proof of collision avoidance.

At press time, the Roberts team was planning their next breakthrough: proving that fully autonomous flying cars are ready for market by declaring their cross-country flight never left the ground.

“Sky is the limit, especially when you redefine the sky as ground and can’t get off of it.”

When reached for comment, the Prius reportedly stated it was just happy someone finally appreciated its ability to clock high miles on the Interstate.