One big difference between Cruise and the rest is that the CEO has built a self driving car from scratch. Because of the inherent path dependency in Hybrid sys

One big difference between Cruise and the rest is that the CEO has built a self driving car from scratch. Because of the inherent path dependency in Hybrid systems (i.e. Software written for one car will most certainly not work on other hardware configurations), I believe having technical knowledge in the leadership makes a huge difference in the long run. The Presence of "old world" tech managers is going to hurt any AV project because building ML systems is so very different because of the implicit empiricism and randomness inherent in the process and the systems.