Waymo is approved for full driverless in California. They ordered 20,000 Jaguar IPaces with delivery starting in 2020. One thing they don’t have is approval to charge for the taxi service.
I think the other thing that can hold it back is time & cost. How quickly can they produce the vehicles? What's the unit cost? What's then the total cost to build a fleet big enough for the parts of the world that are ready for this?
Even Alphabet may not want to front up the entirety of the capital that would be required to scale up Waymo around the world.
They also currently only have two passenger vehicle models that can be outfitted, so they are currently also limited by how quickly those manufacturers can produce those vehicles for them. How quickly can they add a model? Probably takes at least 6 months.
I think we are still a ways from scaling. There is still a real risk of catastrophic failure as they get more real world experience. I think it is going to be quite measured, continuing to slowly roll out to actual people over next 5-10 years.
Waymo is potentially the world most valuable company some time in the not too distant future (before the commercial space industry really takes off). I doubt they will hesitate to scale once the time comes.
But my point is that it's not entirely up to them. They're currently at the mercy of just two vehicle manufacturers who have other customers as well, and may not have completely aligned interests with Waymo.
How hard is it to refactor the rigs for different models? Not much compared to getting the self driving software and data right.
If I were the car manufacturer, I wouldn't mess with Waymo, I'd do everything I could to have them locked in to me and me alone. That would not be achieved by doing anything other than bending over backwards to get this tech working and deployed
