What you describe is in fact what Waymo has had, of chosen to, deal with. They didn't go for an end run around regulations related to vehicles on public roads. They committed to driverless vehicles and worked with local governments to roll it out as quickly as regulators were willing to allow.
Uber could have made the same decision and worked with regulators to be allowed into markets one at a time. It was an intentional choice to lean on the fact that Uber drivers blended into traffic and could hide in plain sight until Uber had enough market share and customer base to give them leverage.
That doesn't really feel like the same thing to me.
With Uber you had a company that wanted to enter an existing market but couldn't due to legally-granted monopolies on taxi service. And given that existing market, you can be sure that the incumbents would lobby to keep Uber locked out.
With Waymo you have a new technology that has a computer driving the car autonomously. There isn't really any directly-incumbent party with a vested (conflict of) interest to argue against it. Waymo is a kind of taxi, though, so presumably existing taxi operators -- and the likes of Uber and Lyft -- could argue against it in order to protect their advantages. But ironically Uber and Lyft "softened" those regulatory bars already, so it might not have been worth it to try.
At any rate, the regulatory and safety concerns are also very different between the two.
I think I am also just a little more sympathetic to early Uber, given how terrible and cartel-like taxi service was in the past. But I would not at all be sympathetic toward Waymo putting driverless cars on the streets without regulatory approval and oversight, especially if people got injured or killed.
My understanding is that regulations for Waymo were much more strict because they billed themselves from the beginning as fully self-driving and wanted to operate on public streets.
My assumption is that they could have found ways to work around that by technically having someone in the drivers west, for example, but maybe I'm wrong there!
I think the difference between Waymo and Uber is risk level. Maybe Waymo would like to skirt regulations but they won't be allowed to by citizens and officials alike.
Waymo could likely have done something similar to Tesla. Pay a licensed driver to sit behind the wheel and claim the car only has driver assist. That likely would have worked long enough to gain traction and leverage to pressure a green light for full driverless mode.
Exactly. Well said.