[joshjob42]

There is no cost pressure on Waymo to reduce rates below Uber or Lyft as they are much smaller, they are price takers not price makers in the market. Lowering prices far below your competitors when you are supply constrained for the time being would just be lighting money on fire.

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).