I'm curious why Waymo is considered to be not living up to expectations? They operate in limited number of places, but seem to be just fine driving there (of course some people will not like them regardless). Tesla - yes, not comparable..
"Even if Waymo's schedule slips a few months and it introduces a self-driving car service in the middle of 2018 instead of late 2017, that will still give the company a multiple-year head start over most of its rivals. And it would confound skeptics who insist that full self-driving technology is still years away."
https://www.ft.com/content/3355f5b0-539d-11e8-b24e-cad6aa67e...
Waymo forecast to capture 60% of driverless market
Group’s dominance by 2030 will force carmakers to adopt its technology, says report
Investment bank UBS estimated global revenues from self-driving technology by 2030 will be up to $2.8tn, with Alphabet’s Waymo unit the global leader.
I read the comment as saying that Waymo's product itself is not living up to expectations.
It looks like it's slowly but steadily expanding, at least in sunnier climes, and offering a decent user experience.
Anyway, the question was about expectations - and those came with a timeline.
The mention was of a "collapse" in the space, too-- which can't be true if we're still getting there.
I expect the timeframe of 2030 is when we get most of the way there. Even exponential growth takes time to reach a big world. Most of what Waymo has left to do is rollout.
I don’t really know the numbers but Waymo adds something like 50k worth of hardware into the cars. That is not a viable approach for consumer cars (Mercedes, Tesla, etc).