One of my good friends was a driver for Cruise (he sit in the cars while they drove and made tons of notes about the behavior)

He said they were pretty awful and would constantly mess up.

That is true for all algorithmic iterative learning. I'm sure early models from Tesla, Waymo, Zoox, etc. were also driving a few hundred feet before the operators had to take over at first as well.

Yep. Participants of Waymo's early rider program are under NDA.