>either you can drive a car autonomously on a given road or not

This doesn't seem obvious to me. My impression is that the rate of improvement on autonomous systems is at least somewhat gradual. You've seen this in Waymo's slow roll out, moving from offering the service in initially less complicated settings (suburbs of Phoenix) and progressing to more challenging terrain (San Francisco). If that's the case, then a competitor could provide a worse product but, due to the fact that accidents are somewhat rare in general, have this go undetected for a while. In the intervening time, the worse performing company would benefit from collecting additional training data that they couldn't have been able to collect under a more strict regulatory regime.

Definitely possible that Waymo would benefit even more though! They definitely seem well prepared (except for the unfortunate hiccup of working with a Chinese OEM right before a bunch of EV tariffs got put in place)

My impression is that we’re regulations to soften, Waymo would quickly expand to freeways - the lack of their ability to do so now constrains their usefulness

If you won't turn on FSD how do you know Waymo is vastly superior?

What I mean is that I’ve used it and don’t like how it drives / had bad experiences, so I won’t use it now even when it’s free

Tesla has data from 5 million vehicles in real world conditions.

What does Waymo have, a few hundred cars in San Francisco and Phoenix? In a field where data matters more than anything else, Tesla has an insane advantage.

And yet waymo appears to be ahead commercially?

Because Tesla is yet to start commercial operations in this area.

Waymo (and every other AV company) mostly use simulated data. The real world stuff is very repetitive and not that important; they also don't collect nearly as much as you think they do.

And it doesn't help with the main issue, which is Tesla uses cameras and cameras don't work reliably at night, in glare, when they're dirty, etc.