Waymo, Alphabet 's self-driving car unit, is having a relatively good couple of months – at least, compared to one of its key rivals: GM 's Cruise. When Cruise began offering fully autonomous rides in San Francisco in the winter of 2022, Waymo followed in the fall. Now, after a barrage of safety concerns and incidents with Cruise self-driving cars in recent months, the landscape looks starkly different. I have worked with pretty high-scale systems before Waymo, at Google and Ericsson, and this is a pretty staggering scale. [Note: Waymo recently shared that Waymo riders took more than 700,000 trips in autonomous vehicles in 2023.]

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Persons: Cruise, Waymo, Saswat Panigrahi, you've, –, … Organizations: Google, Cruise, California Department of Motor Vehicles, GM, CNBC, Ericsson, Phoenix Locations: Phoenix, San Francisco, Austin, Buffalo , New York, California, U.S