Not sure where you got the idea that Waymo doesn’t value hardware development - their whole lawsuit saga against Uber was over lidar trade secrets (google “laser is the sauce”). Maybe you were thinking of Tesla who has insisted their existing video/radar stack will be competitive with enough ML? For all the other major SDV companies I’m familiar with, affordable and peformative lidar is a huge focus.

Waymo handed out pcbs as earrings and their patents were bs.

Most companies want lidar to get cheaper not better. Very rarely has the solution to a perception problem been "better sensors" as opposed to "more ml".

I interpreted it as the exact opposite :)

If Waymo can revamp the car's sensor suite this late in the process, all the while ramping up their fleets and consumer services, it suggests to me that their software is sufficiently powerful and flexible not to need massive and costly retraining; basically I think they have "solved" the problem on the software side (given appropriate constraints such as good weather, excellent mapping, etc.) and are now working on rationalizing the hardware costs.

I think it's safe to say they wouldn't be logging anywhere near 10M miles if that weren't the case.

Especially when the graph shows that they've completed 6M of those 10M in the last year! (https://www.theatlas.com/charts/S1uAcpj97)