I thought that pretty much every self driving algorithm in production was based on machine learning of some sort.

In most cases it’s only the object recognition systems that use machine learning. I know that Tesla was talking about using non-deterministic AI for the decision making as well, but it’s a worry if they’re already doing it.

Earlier Tesla self-driving software used search-based planning and conventional optimization alongside neural networks. Tesla has publicly demonstrated A* in its path planning work.