You are correct that Waymo does operate taxis on cities, however Autopilot collects data on highways and rural roads as well. The Waymo model currently depends

You are correct that Waymo does operate taxis on cities, however Autopilot collects data on highways and rural roads as well. The Waymo model currently depends on 3D mapping entire cities down to the centimeter and then augmenting that point cloud with LIDAR (ideally in the future they don't need to 3D map every operating city). However, Waymo is using outfitted consumer minivans, not custom built vehicles. You can imagine that if the system becomes popular enough Honda and Toyota are going to want their slice of the pie once they realize that they can rent out self driving models rather than selling once at a dealership. It will be easier for a car maker to work with existing software rather than for a software company to build a vehicle. Tesla here owns the full vertical stack, much like Apple does with smartphones. That doesn't mean that they will control the entire market, however they will be able to squeeze much more value out of the market than competitors.