I feel like the bigger issue is that Cruise evidently had an unsafe company culture (like Uber): It wasn't just that they had an incident, it's that they lied about the incident and tried to cover things up.

This has been a pretty consistent pattern -- Cruise was always less transparent about its safety data than Waymo, and its claims tended to be opaque and non-measurable, whereas Waymo was partnering with insurance companies to get hard data.

Waymo is going to have incidents, too, but I think they have made the (correct) decision that being open and transparent about safety stuff is the way they move past those; Cruise made a decision in the opposite direction, and it killed them.