Waymo is banking on Lidar being the solution to autonomous vehicles, the reason tesla doesn't use them is that Elon thinks Lidar won't work and that we need Ai for driverless cars (or more accurately a highly advanced AGI).
At first, I thought Elon was being too radical, he's known for overcorrecting for the sunk cost fallacy, but after more time, I share his view.
Personally, I think Waymo is a joke. Just because they came from Google they think they're too big to fail before even having a product for market. They've already lost 170 billion in just a year an a half. The CEO got charged with stealing tech and selling it to tesla, then got sued by tesla when he made a competitor to the stolen tech he sold them.
Take it as you will, personally I'm pretty bias against google these days, Pichai has ruined the company for me. I feel he's turned google into Microsoft, there's nothing wrong with Microsoft, but we already have one of those, it was nice when we also had a google.