Also, I don’t think Waymo is guaranteed to be the first to reach fully autonomous driving. What I know of their approach (which is fairly little, but wat does anybody outside Waymo know for sure there?), to me, seems they are building not cars that are autonomous, but networked. That has advantages (if one car notices a bump in the road, one riding the same road 10 minutes later can slow down), but also has the disadvantages that their software may depend too much on always having that network knowledge available. That may leave space for a competitor to grow in regions where roads barely exist.

Waymo also spends a lot on things that, in a few years, autonomous cars may not need not do at all.

For example, countries that want to speed up adoption of autonomous cars may make detecting traffic signs and traffic lights easier (e.g. by superimposing a high-frequency signal on LED traffic lights or by giving cars read access to a city’s traffic light infrastructure), make la e detection easier (e.g. by embedding cat eyes in the center of lanes) or require cars to better signal their intentions. If that happens, a lot of the work Waymo does on detecting all kinds of ‘static’ infrastructure becomes worth less.