Well they just announced that they are doing tens of thousands of rides per week. That either works or it doesn't. And they seem pretty comfortable doing that. Also there's a distinct lack of horror stories involving Waymo cars. And I assume that they don't have thousands of mechanical turks wielding a joystick somewhere, which means these things are mostly working as advertised (i.e. autonomously) with the very occasional manual intervention.
So, what you are asserting and that cannot be true at the same time. So, my conclusion is that whatever you think you know here is probably wrong.
Idgaf if they're round-tripping the equivalent to mars and back weekly, the fact of the matter is their tech cannot perform at the level of a human driver who's had their license for a week, by their own admission. No amount of argle-bargle changes that as the autonomy levels are very well-defined and Waymo self-reports as L4 under optimal conditions and no clear path to L5 in sight in the next decade. Let's not confuse a legislative fuckup on the part of cdot with actual technical prowess yeah?
You are splitting hairs. Tens of thousands of rides per week. Autonomously. Those are the keywords. Other things they are bragging about involve such things as 24/7, night and day, and foggy conditions. I would suggest actually reading the short press release. They make quite a few interesting claims in it. Anyway, anyone in the SFO area will probably be reporting all the wonderful and uneventful rides they are enjoying with Waymo soon.
As for people that recently got their drivers license. I'm pretty sure that demographic is over-represented in the statistics of who drives the least safely, traffic fatalities, etc. Also insurers and rental car agencies have policies that reflect those cold, hard statistics. It will be interesting to see what they do when level 5 starts happening (probably sooner rather than later). My guess is that they'll charge people extra for the privilege of taking control of the car as they are far more likely to damage the vehicle and otherwise cause trouble.
And obviously one of the points Waymo is trying to make with their press release is that they are already safer. It's a press release of course and not the same as cold hard facts. And you make a fair point about self reporting. But it suggests the obvious notion that computers are getting pretty good at not crashing into stuff (or people). I find that entirely unsurprising, BTW. It does not seem like a particularly hard problem.
I'm not splitting hairs. The difference between L4 and L5 autonomy is enormous. I submit that you cannot get enhanced safety outcomes out of a system that cannot perform the task at hand at least as well as a mediocre human, and realistically not until you're routinely out-performing the bulk of human operators. And if you think not crashing into random shit in a perfectly chaotic environment is an easily solved problem please explain to me why store PoS tech (orders of magnitude smaller problem space) has been a roiling dumpster fire for decades now. Software doesn't have an amazing track record at solving problems. It has proven to be absolutely phenomenal at shifting problem spaces in weird ways and introducing spectacularly stupid unplanned side effects however.
So, what you are asserting and that cannot be true at the same time. So, my conclusion is that whatever you think you know here is probably wrong.