Isn’t the implication there that Uber works because the drivers shoulder more costs and make less money, but Waymo won’t work because they have to shoulder all the costs?
Plenty of companies around the world have well-maintained fleets of vehicles. Trucking businesses, bus companies, train companies, even some taxi companies with salaried drivers, ...
Waymo is replacing human drivers with a capital-intensive fleet business, a substantially more expensive vehicle, and still a large number of remote assistance staff, fleet operators, safety engineers, incident response, operations staff, etc.
But I'm not saying they can't beat a human driver, I'm just saying it hasn't been proven that they will. It may only be that the highest demand markets will provide a sufficient enough utilization to make it economically viable.