> Probably Waymo
Waymo has spend 10+ years and they can now barley driven in possibly the easiest location in the world, a location where they have logged millions of miles. Waymo focuses on the easiest thing first. The technology on their car is incredibly expensive both now and to scale it to 10k, 100k, 1M vehicles is a huge challenge, both capital and manufacturing.
They are like a rocket company who says, we have this amazing air-frame, launch pad, software we only need to figure out the engine, then we are gone make money.
I place my bets on the company that has million of cars on the road, seeing every corner case possible in every location, because that is the real challenge to overcome if you actually want to have many 1000s of cars in every city. Plus the sensor suit and compute power in a Tesla maybe cost a few 1000$, scalable to 10s of millions of vehicles.
I don't think either of them is really close to self driving, but at least Tesla is focusing on the right problem with a scalable solution.
> What’s stopping Waymo from patenting this after they get to an acceptable threshold and selling it to their competitors?
If their technology actually works they would want to dominate the self driving taxi market and not sell it to the competition.
Their competitors would then have to install this whole Waymo hardware suit, making it not very practical for OEMs and normal cars. Uber or Lyft might be costumers, but why would you sell it to them if you could just replace them.
Waymo has burned money for 10+ years, signing a few licensing deal for a slightly better Mobile Eye will not give the return they are hoping for.
