Some amazing and big strides would have an effect but only to the point of shortening that time table from ~10 to maybe 5 years. Realistically that is...
The public is just now becoming aware to the fact that self driving cars are coming, but just because the public has just heard of something doesn't mean it just started being worked on.
There are vary hard technical challenges that have been continuously worked on for decades. There's been some fantastic progress over the past decade but there's still a lot to be done. These problems cover a very wide range of problem domains and whatever the final result is, it will be due to a bunch of very specialized research coming together. Computer vision systems, sensor and environmental mapping advancements, decision making "ai", machine learning, etc, etc. Soooo much stuff has to come together and it's going to take researchers, engineers and industry suppliers of all kinds working together.
Anyway on to the companies you mentioned...
No one knows what Apple has going on and to be honest, not many really care. Apart from a couple high profile hires they don't really have any trump cards that would change anything. All the other tech and high profile researchers are solidly at other companies that have been working on this for much longer. They likely just have test vehicles to dump some R&D money into, but time will tell.
Google has no skin in the game as far as consumer production vehicles go, nor do they intend to in the future. Their interests are in developing the tech and licensing to actual automakers. They've got some amazing stuff going on but we're not talking about research and prototype vehicles we're about wide spread consumer availability at volumes that would significantly effect the market. If they solved all the problems to solve and licensed all the tech out to a manufactured today, the average production cycle on a vehicle is 3-5 years. That puts us at ~2019-2020 on what will probably start out with a higher priced premium vehicle and trickle down to the lower segments over the next couple years.
Telsa has a very strong chance, they have the intellectual capital, the motivation, the production capabilities, and they're willing to spend the money (even if they haven't made a profit yet). They're also willing to update and upgrade the vehicles they have on the ground rather than make consumers buy a brand new vehicle to get incremental improvements. This is huge because as those technical challenges are solved improvements and feedback can be had within a year or two rather than five. Musk has said 2018 is when their vehicles will be able to be full autonomous but even if they meet that mark it would still be sometime before hit production vehicles and they're still a very low volume manufacturer.
So yes the time table can be shortened, just not by much.