Yet L4 is still nowhere in sight. What Tesla has now, Waymo had a demo for almost a decade ago. Either Waymo has been doing literally nothing for the past decade, or there's something more subtle and far more difficult about getting to L4.
Or just like a ton of other companies like Magic Leap, they went for a moonshot and are discovering that it would have been better to iterate instead.
I suspect we will see a replay here of the ULA versus SpaceX history of the last ten years, and at the end, Google is going to look up and wonder "what happened" while Tesla continues to dominate the actual market.
It's interesting to me that you label Google's approach as a moonshot, because to me that better describes Tesla's approach. They're skipping the "crutch" of Lidar and geofencing and betting the farm on a software breakthrough. If it were anyone but Tesla, it would be a joke.
My expectation is that Tesla gets better and better but doesn't move beyond a driver assistance package for a very long time. None of the hardware sold today ends up being FSD.
Waymo remains limited in scope by its business model. It rolls out driverless taxis to more and more cities, but you can't buy a Waymo FSD car, and it remains geofenced for a decade or more.
Which company wins the race to being able to buy a car without a steering wheel that will take you anywhere? I could see Tesla winning that.
But Waymo is in a position to capture significant economic benefit by being an Uber competitor and providing logistics in the meantime, if they can scale up quickly enough.
Regardless of how it goes, it's going to be fun to watch.
> Or just like a ton of other companies like Magic Leap, they went for a moonshot and are discovering that it would have been better to iterate instead.
Waymo started with the iterative approach, and threw it out of the window after they observed what Tesla is observing now: Humans suck at monitoring. Their testers started doing all kinds of crap while the car they were supposed to be supervising was driving, including texting, make-up and taking a nap.
Waymo identified the risks, and had the luxury to take a step back, and re-aim the moonshot. Tesla made the same discovery, but can't (or at least didn't) go back and say "we need to re-evaluate our approach to FSD" - and instead keep trying to get people to stay attentive at the monotone task of monitoring the vehicle, while continue to keep the blame on the human when they crash and die.
Now Waymo is in the position of being not only the current leader in self-driving tech (having cars without drivers on the road), but also having the perception of being the responsible player in the field, putting safety over profit&sales. Having the first cars without drivers on the road allows them to help inform legislation in that space, while Tesla is still struggling to convince their test drivers (=customers) to pay attention and not crash.
