How would the engineers at Waymo know Tesla's trade-secret approach beyond the physical hardware ? Tesla is the only major player in the race to autonomous cars that has no patent. Waymo has 145.[1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/08/a-tesla-self-driving-blind-s...

I'm betting a bunch of them own Tesla's (status symbols). You can tell a lot about a system just by using it and testing it.

Some of them used to work at Tesla. They also take issue with the use of lossy sonar and the failure to incorporate lidar.

I can understand why there might be.

Source: Watched a presentation on the computational aspects recently.