What I find kind of disturbing and disingenuous about what Waymo has done and/or achieved is that their premise is safety, but they really haven't deployed any of their technologies to aid in the safety of consumer vehicles. They began this whole autonomous mission more than 10 years ago and yet they haven't provided / sold their technology to OEMs or anybody else to improve the safety of production cars. If Waymo had such great vision and/or sensors, they can't even sell one to OEMs to improve everyone's safety?
Short answer:
They were going to do just that. They had a hands-free L2 highway system called "autopilot" in 2010 that they were going to sell to consumer cars but then they determined it would not be the safest way to go. They believe L4 driverless FSD is the best way to make roads safer in the long term. Thus, they are now focused on L4 as the best path to making roads safer in the long term. Once the L4 is safe enough, they plan to lease robotaxis to consumers as well as continue to offer driverless ride-hailing.
Long answer:
The Google Self-Driving Project completed 1000 miles of autonomous driving with no interventions in 2010. At that time, they were going to commercialize the product as a hands-free highway L2 system. They even called it "Autopilot". However, when they tested the system, they found that the drivers got complacent, trusted the system too much and did not pay attention to the road like they were supposed. Google determined that a L2 system that gives the illusion of self-driving but requires driver attention is not the best way to make driving safer in the long term because it requires driver attention to be safe but can't reliably enforce that driver attention.
Google concluded that the only way to make driving truly safer in the long term is to go straight to L4. In other words, develop a system that can reliably drive itself without a human driver. That way, driver attention is irrelevant. It solves the problem of drivers getting complacent and not paying attention since the system is not dependent on them paying attention anymore. So they focused on L4, eventually spinning off their self-driving project to become Waymo. They believe that deploying reliable L4 as they are doing now with Waymo One ride-hailing does make the roads safer and will make the roads even safer, as they scale up. Of course, Waymo One is small right now, so the impact on road safety might be small but as Waymo scales to more cities, that impact on road safety will become bigger and bigger. And eventually, when the L4 is safe enough, they will lease robotaxis to consumers.
So their strategy is A) make sure the driverless FSD is safe and reliable (several times safer than human) and then B) expand it to more cities in a responsible way. They believe that is the best way to actually make roads safer in the long term because you are replacing human drivers with a system that is many times safer than humans.
