Tesla attempts to solve self-driving by generating a sufficiently-accurate world model in the moment, relying very heavily on vision. Waymo solves self-driving with a centimeter-level precision pre-scanned map of all the places it can drive, relying very heavily on point clouds and LIDAR.

The latter model doesn’t scale, and can’t handle surprises.

Or who knows, maybe it could scale if you had a global fleet of specialized vehicles and gigabit/s full-duplex internet connections in all cars. But that’s a different approach even to Waymo’s.