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.
