From the outside in this is how I see it (being in Austin which seems to be ground zero for a lot of the testing):
Waymo is betting that cutting zero corners and being rigorous will pay off down the line. They seem best in class.
Zoox seems to be betting that reducing time to get passengers in and out while providing a novel platform will be a differentiator. More sensors than Tesla but fewer cars than both the others.
Cybercab seems to be about cutting cost (and corners) wherever they thing they can get away from it and betting cheap will win the day (sort of like a discount airline). This assumes they're not doing something O(N) expensive behind the scenes, like having every ride monitored by a human operator in another country.
I remember some company dragging a person for awhile and the car not realizing. I'm worried tesla will find itself in a situation like that (or another edge case). I feel safer being around a Waymo as a pedestrian than a cybercab. I even had a Waymo stop for me at a pedestrian crossing when I was waiting for it to go by (I wasn't trying to cross).
In the long run Waymo will have to figure out how to have a cheaper platform and Tesla will have to toe the cheap/good-enough line. Zoox is still seemingly unlaunched so IDK about them. Time will tell.
Interesting overview. And on who will win, on one hand, as you said, Waymo's platform is better, and they just need to continue focusing on developing it cheaper. But on the other hand, Tesla has the volume in that you can already buy a car with FSD (although, we're talking about taxis, not consumer cars, but Tesla has assembly lines ready to produce 100k of taxis). Hmm, hard call...
... just looked it up, Waymo's 6th gen hardware is estimated to cost $20k per vehicle. That's getting down there. And if they ever do even higher volumes, will probably go down further: https://x.com/fchollet/status/2023522267846815874
Looked online, Waymo is really starting to ramp up it's services. They're now in 13 US cities (including Atlanta and Austin): https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119#zippy=
And are planning on increasing the size of their fleet by a factor of 5: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/waymo-...
They will have a huge advantage and seems to me like Waymo is going to win out, but can never tell.