FYI. FSD is safer than human drivers on large datasets. Accidents cause deaths of thousands every year. Arguing against FSD for "safety" has The Grim Reaper cackling.
Waymo is SLS compared to Starship. So, not comparable and could never fit the shoes Robotaxi has been planned to fill since the initiation of the FSD project. I.E. SLS = a few academic missions. Starship: Mars colony. Waymo is as good for safety as doing nothing with its inability to scale.
Waymo costs as much per ride as one with a driver. Robotaxi is technologically fundamentally close to starting its shift after you arrive home and get out of your car. Earning you part of the profit btw. And with no growing pains, with FSD working on novel, untested roads.
>Growing pains
Robotaxi has been in testing for less than like 1/50 the time Waymo has been out, and has already once surpassed coverage in their starting city.
You know who also had growing pains? Hulk. Growing that quick.
Elon can literally draw and balls a dick on top of Waymo's long-amassed support area. Even if they want to check these starting areas a bit better with some basic mapping setups in advance, it's obvious their stack isn't hindered by requirement of hard, slow HD mapping and cars that look like they're growing mushrooms with the ugly LIDAR sensors on them.
Mapping is expensive, but not really in a per-mile-driven basis. There are 4M miles of public roads which get over 3.2T miles of total driving, or ~800k vehicle-miles per road-mile. You could have pretty high mapping costs per mile and still have very low per-mile-traveled costs for mapping. And there's every reason to think the cost of mapping and updating maps on a per-road-mile basis will go down over time, not up.
Waymo is scaling pretty rapidly, and the rate of expansion is accelerating. They've been proving out the technology, and are only now starting to commission special purpose vehicles as they move out of the research phase and into deployment.
Perhaps Tesla will catch up, but for now we know Waymo's are at least ~6x safer than humans in diverse independent conditions, while FSD according to publicly available information is 50-100x less safe (with critical interventions every few hundred miles).