Why was this downvoted? Waymo has always been the clear leader in autonomous/self driving capabilities, at least for the true driverless goal. Briefly there were one or two milestones that Cruise got neck and neck on, but still think the parent’s sentiment holds true.
The keys to Waymo's success and reliability are infrastructure and experience.
(Waymo is a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc. That makes Google a sister company. Google doesn't operate Waymo.)
Google has built infrastructure and experience from the get-go, from driving Street View cars and building Maps, operating their own data centers, plenty of GPU application experience, teams of human support agents (yes they exist and respond), and just being really good at collecting, organizing, analyzing telemetry.
That's why I have confidence in the vehicles and Waymo Driver. This service is an iteration and evolutionary step. The Hive Mind behind the car has everything well in hand. Everyone else is just makin' cars and drivin' around alone. NO COMPARISON!
I can get into my Tesla, that I own and don't have to rent through an app, right now, and have FSD take me to the airport, or literally anywhere I want to go in the country. I don't have to be in one of San Francisco, Austin, Los Angeles, or whatever cities Waymo operates in. Tesla is leagues ahead, and to say Waymo is the "clear leader in autonomous driving" is a total joke. And this is coming from someone who regularly uses Waymo in SF. It's a cool tech demo but that's about it.
I'm not comparing Waymo to FSD because FSD has not shown the ability to be "truly diverless", aka Level 4+, which was an important distinction I made (perhaps not too clearly) in my comment.
FSD is probably the leading Level 2 autonomy system. As you point out it covers a massively broader set of geographies and conditions than Waymo can. On the flip side, it won't even take you around the block if you just get in the back seat and expect it to handle everything. Perhaps next week we will see major update from Tesla towards Level 4, but until FSD breaks past L2 supervised capabilities they are different products solving for massively different trade-offs.
Always has been.