Cruise did exactly the wrong thing by folding under pressure and stopping all operations. Appeasing your critics simply doesn't work. The appeasement alienates your supporters while doing nothing to change the minds of your critics as is amply demonstrated in this thread and elsewhere. Cruise's cars were almost certainly not more dangerous than human driven cars. The CYA bureaucrats have taken over and there is no place for a founder at Cruise anymore.

IMO Cruise's fatal mistake was choosing San Francisco. It was hubris to think that they could change the minds of a populace and government clearly set on hating everything to do with tech. There are probably a bunch of cities that would be proud to host self-driving cars, rather than antagonistic. Things could have played out differently.