Yeah I totally agree. I took one of the car programming classes online and found that while the instructor was (obviously) really smart, he sucked at programming. He tried to write out mathematical equations in python rather than structure the code in a way that simply described what was going on. At the end of each mini lesson I'd refactor his code so that it made sense (mostly doing small stuff like changing variable names from their corresponding mathematical symbols to the word of what they actually were, or factoring blocks into methods). Eventually I gave up not because I couldn't understand the domain of self driving cars (he was great at explaining that stuff), but because I couldn't keep up with the mathematical syntax (and the online course kept wiping my code and resetting with his, which was extremely frustrating).
If you do not learn the mathematical structure it is going to be hard to do anything further in the field after the course. Why not just bite the bullet and properly learn the pre-reqs?
With a basic course in linear algebra (such as Gilbert Strang's on MIT OpenCourseWare) and potentially some intro calculus you should fly through that course.
