That sounds right. Unless Waymo considers car manufacturers to be its competition and therefore something to commoditize, it wouldn't make sense for them to get involved in ground-up manufacturing.

And by this point, it seems like an electric-car platform already is close to a commodity, which is another reason for Waymo not to waste capital building another.

They probably see the electronics and software as their product, hopefully they will license it to someone so my next car will have it :). Lidar prices are cheap enough these days (but coming out of China, so who knows with Trump if that will apply to us).