If Tesla can make it work without lidar, and that’s a huge “if”, they have a massive head start in training data. From a conference panel a few years ago that had Tesla, Waymo and some others on stage at the same time, Tesla was getting as much data in a week as Google was in months. That type of training data asymmetry is ripe for blowing past others. Again though that’s all conditioned on not needing lidar and I remain far from convinced their approach works for a true self-driving system.
Waymo's cars are connected to Waymo's servers with, I guess, gigabit ethernet (after they go back to base for the night), Tesla's cars are connected by mobile data, they'd have to pay billions to cell phone networks to get as much data.
