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(1) Yes. (2) Yes. (3) Yes.

The main point is that Waymo had a 4-6 year head start over virtually everyone else in this industry. So it's not surprising that their technology seems significantly better! Obviously we don't yet know how much better, or if it's good enough to improve on the average human driver. But they seem to be pretty close.

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The downside to their head start is that they had to build their system from scratch, and there was a great deal of trial and error.

The upside is that they had the very best, most passionate and talented roboticists in the field working on it, as nobody else was hiring at the time. For every company entering late in the game, securing top tier talent is the biggest hurdle.

Not only the head start but they weren't a business, they did deep research for the sake of it. Not to sell it right away. Many said that mobileye and others were very crude systems. I think the idea was that having real mileage in Teslas and similar experience would accelerate improvement .. so far it didn't help AFAIK<

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