Not sure what is happening here, but it might be worth trying with --low-level-retries 20 to see if it needs a bit more time to initialise or something.
Once it has started it should be OK. Note that since it takes such a long time to start up then you probably want to run an rclone mount to use it so you don't have to keep stopping and starting it. I don't normally recommend that as it is more efficient to use rclone copy than cp from and rclone mount but I think it might be a good idea in this case!
I left rclone copy going overnight to see what would happen and a colab script doing a copy also. One of them copied successfully, probably the colab script as the rclone log is just full of
Failed to copy: failed to open source object: open download file failed: Try again
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<title>Error 408 (Request Timeout)!!1</title>
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<p><b>408.</b> <ins>That’s an error.</ins>
<p>Your client has taken too long to issue its request. <ins>That’s all we know.</ins>
So it looks as though the time taken is too long for Google.
I'll look into mounting and see if it helps, thanks.