If they were Tesla only problems, why did other companies feel the need to advance the state of the art in their radar hardware? They did so because poor radar equipment wasn't a Tesla only problem, but was a problem that many identified. Poor radar was not a Tesla only problem, but a common problem.

Now the world state advanced to a world in which WayMo had more advanced radars and Tesla did not have more advanced radars, but instead stopped using bad radars. Both companies however made the decision to abandon the radars that they previously had. Both identified getting rid of their former radars as the correct solution to the problem of radars which did not meet their needs. So it isn't the case that it was a Tesla only problem and it isn't the case that the two companies had terribly different ideas about how to solve the problem. Both companies improved their car by relying on technology to make up for shortcoming in radar systems. The difference was in how they did it. Tesla did it by devoting more effort to the vision stack whereas WayMo did it by devoting more effort to hardware improvements.

In the video you dismiss there are segments that show Tesla's vision-only system successfully identifying distances despite the presence of fog. They also identify things that are stationary. They also identify things that are moving. So the things you cite for supporting your thesis that Tesla failed aren't examples of things that Tesla is doing that WayMo isn't. They are examples of things that both cars are doing. That means they are worthless for making a claim of superiority.

Having failed to establish superiority you move on to claiming that Tesla wanted to cut costs and that this was their motivation for doing this. This is cast in a bad light as if cutting cost harms safety. In reality training data is precious and collecting it improves performance. Cutting cost allows greater volume of production by lowering the capital cost of production. This results in more sales. This results in more data. The net result is a better training set, improving performance. You aren't even correct that cutting costs actually results in less spending on solving the critical problems: cutting costs leads to increased sales which leads to increased revenue and in turn increased profits which leads to more capital for development, not less capital for development, which means more capital gets allocated to solving self-driving problems. As such cutting costs has the impact of increasing the amount that is spent on researching the problem as time goes on.

The big difference in their choices isn't that Tesla is approaching it in a bad way and WayMo in a good way. It is that WayMo is getting funding from projects that aren't itself. It can afford to make bad decisions in terms of cost-effectiveness when it thinks that it improves the probability of eventual success. This sort of spending model has historically been simultaneously underwhelming and overwhelming in what it produced. Overwhelming because it does things like get us to the moon, but underwhelming in that it does so in such a cost ineffective way such that we don't return.

This is shaping up to be the difference between WayMo and Tesla in practice. WayMo handles driving in fenced off locations well! This is the overwhelming awesome thing it does. However, at the same time, it has extremely low production volume and doesn't support all cities. This is like how we got to the moon, but then didn't get to keep going there. Meanwhile, Tesla has literally millions upon millions more self-driving miles.

However, this actually works out in practice to WayMo harming public health in comparison to Tesla? Why? Well, self-driving plus humans is already better than humans driving alone. WayMo has technology that could save lives to the tune of some fraction of the ninety people in the US who die every day in accidents not dying. WayMo isn't letting that technology save those lives. Instead, Tesla is letting a similar technology save those lives. As Tesla scales it captures more of the market, it stops more of those deaths. Thus in terms of their net benefit in terms of death reduction, WayMo actually loses by far. Every moment they don't scale while Tesla does scale, they lose some more. The only hope for them catching up is to achieve greater scale than Tesla which is going to give them a cost effectiveness problem or alternatively they need Tesla to mess up in a truly massive way that forces regulators hands - something that regulators and Tesla don't want at present, because the current trend is lives being saved from human errors.