Great news! It does seem like the 5th gen hardware will enable scale and real revenue generating operations for Waymo.
The videos coming out of driverless rides in SF [1][2] and Downtown Phoenix [3] (both employee-only currently) look very impressive. So I don’t doubt they can crack LA.
It will be interesting to see how Waymo progressively reduces deploy time in a new city.
[1] https://youtu.be/ZBvce_eC28A