The difference being...
That a self-driving car could easily have other sense than just binocular vision to play with, such as laser range-finding and RADAR. Further, the binocular vision can have a MUCH larger inter-axial distance than the Mk I eyeballs do. We get 62mm more or less, while a self driving car could easily have four "eyes", with clusters of two checking close clearances, and the binocular image between the two clusters serving as a much longer base for measuring parallax.
The real issue is that all of those solutions involve making it easy with hardware, and that means buying actual bits of things, which costs money. For cars, where one would expect there to be millions of the things, anything you can do in software to save buying hardware returns the savings milllions-fold. This isn't about doing these things *at all*, its about doing them for 50% less hardware and saving pots of money on the manufacturing side.
But that sounds much less impressive headlines: "Boffins save car manufacturers lots of money in the future" doesn't have the same punch.