Tesla has much lower costs. If they can beat Waymo on customer experience (better driving primarily, but also better in-car entertainment, better mobile app, and match Waymo's pricing) they'll win.
Waymo might have a regulatory advantage since a lot of politians don't like Musk.
They only have a car that can drive with a human partner behind the wheel who's ready at any second to take over and prevent it from crashing.
Even that is a faulty system.
I really don't understand how people can think Tesla and Waymo are anywhere close to each other. Making a car drive itself is a much harder problem to solve than scaling production. If you look at what Tesla has, today, it is a vehicle that can sometimes drive on its own with the need for a human behind the wheel. The ability to remove the human from the front seat is the other 95% of the work. In systems like this where human lives are at stake, getting "mostly there" with FSD is essentially worthless.
The problems of logistics and scaling are well-known and well traveled. The invention of a self-driving car is not. Once Waymo has solved the issue of entering new cities and quickly gathering data to feed into their model, they've won.
I think it's possible, but it's definitely less trivial than scaling production of more self driving cars.
Yes there can be cleaning fees and vetting, but all it takes is one or two people puking in your Tesla, and you'll have no interest in providing a Robotaxi for Musk's Mission.
> Yes there can be cleaning fees and vetting, but all it takes is one or two people puking in your Tesla, and you'll have no interest in providing a Robotaxi for Musk's Mission.
Plenty of Tesla owners (and owners of all sorts of other vehicles including high-end sports cars and luxury vehicles) already rent out their vehicles to strangers on Turo. Listing them on Tesla's platform instead won't be a large change. A lot of owners might actually prefer it if it allows more fine-grained options (eg. no rides past 9pm, no rides more than 50 miles from home) instead of renting it out for 24 hour periods.
The entry bar for renting a vehicle on Turo is quite a bit more substantial than hailing an Uber. I looked at making my cars available.
You can restrict the age of the driver (anything vaguely high end I see required you to be 30+), require substantial deposits ($750), proof of your own insurance, mileage and location limitations, and more. Versus "Downloaded the Robotaxi app and put in a credit card number".
The Tesla-owned fleet will likely have the same requirements as riding an Uber. If the rumors are to be believed, those will be dedicated robotaxi vehicles with no steering wheel.
Of course for peer-to-peer you will be able to set your own requirements based on what you're comfortable with, or even just not join the network at all so your car stays exclusively yours.