You really don't? 8 years ago Tesla did a (fake) video of their car "self driving" on real streets. 8 years of promises and in effort to convice their investors that they are actually making progress towards that goal is.....a movie set with fake streets to drive on? While Waymo is delivering real self driving taxi rides in the real world? What isn't clear about this message to you, exactly?
"Tesla FSD Supervised Tops 1.6 Billion Total Miles Driven": https://teslanorth.com/2024/08/07/tesla-fsd-supervised-1-6-b...
Seems obvious that movie sets are like red carpets, no?
I don't really know what you're trying to say with the politics distraction, so I guess the answer to your last question is "apparently you can't."
So you're unaware of the AI day presentations about their driving training pipeline. Learning about their engineering in that regard really changed my perception of the likelihood that they could solve the problem. Give it a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODSJsviD_SU
> failure to keep up with competitors like Waymo
Looks like each of them lead in different ways to me. Waymo leads within certain specific city limits, Tesla leads on the open road. These seem to be direct consequences of their engineering decisions. Question is which will converge on working everywhere all the time.