To me the Theranos comparison is apt in one way and inapt in another way. I think it works insofar as Cruise is clearly selling lies to unwitting investors.

Where it breaks down (in my opinion) is that I think that self-driving cars are possible in principle, though maybe not with anything like today's technology. Maybe the AI needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, and that could be a multi-decade project. But given that human drive cars, I think it's reasonable that machines could drive cars.

Theranos, on the other hand, was grift by inspection. The small amounts of sample she was proposing to use to measure some of the things she wanted to measure couldn't in some cases give you a big enough stochastic set to say with any confidence that the measurements were meaningful. That is, biology is a statistical science, and you need a certain signal:noise ratio to say anything smart. If you're below that threshold, then you're only measuring noise. That is, there's a lower limit of detection for many metabolites independent of the measurement modality, and my belief (though I'm not an expert in what she was claiming to do) is that she was proposing to more or less break the laws of statistics.

I could be wrong on both counts.