Looking over the incidents in the last few months, it's pretty clear that Waymo is significantly better than Cruise in tech - Cruise has a lot of things to fix and they clearly rushed it but have good PR team to sell it well and make it seem like Waymo and Cruise are in the same bucket.

If I were Waymo, I'd start doing the best I can to distance myself from Cruise - I think it's unfair for any city regulations that'll come after things like this to effect Waymo which is doing much better but is in the 'AV' category with Cruise.

Look at this hilarious video where a Cruise is stuck in the middle of the road and a Waymo passes by it, imo better than what other human drivers did: https://www.tiktok.com/@highwithlo/video/7266311787237362990 Listen to the audio; small things like this can significantly skew public opinion/belief.

Edit: More evidence - checkout Cruise twitter account reply history; most of the replies are Cruise justifying why they fucked up or hyping up their approvals and numbers. Look at Waymo's history, there is barely any mention of an incident (I'm making a fair assumption that both companies have a similar PR strategy of responding to popular tweets with incidents involving their vehicles).

Cruise: https://twitter.com/Cruise/with_replies Waymo: https://twitter.com/Waymo/with_replies