Self-driving Uber cars have been pulled from the road in California after the Department of Motor Vehicles declared them improperly registered.
On Wednesday, NPR reported that the DMV revoked the registrations of 16 cars because they were not properly registered as test vehicles. Uber has been known to skirt rules when it comes to taking the first steps toward the self-driving future in Pittsburgh and California. State regulators also flagged self-driving Ubers in San Francisco for driving before Uber had received a permit for autonomous vehicles.
Autonomous Ubers still require a human “safety driver” behind the wheel, because the self-driving programming is still in early stages. This is where the regulations get muddled: Uber states that, because there is a person in the car, they don’t need a self-driving car permit.
The DMV disagrees. On Wednesday, the agency released a statement that “Uber is welcome to test its autonomous technology in California like everybody else, through the issuance of a testing permit that can take less than 72 hours to issue after a completed application is submitted.”
Uber has acquiesced to removing the self-driving cars from the road for now.
“We’re now looking at where we can redeploy these cars,” a company spokesperson said.
Uber will also continue to get in on the ground floor with California state lawmakers as they develop statewide rules for similar cases.
In other Uber news, the rideshare company has begun to use a fleet of Teslas in Madrid, a city in which Uber had been temporarily banned for using unlicensed drivers. Now, the rideshare service is back, but is subject to limitations. Use of the electric cars was approved in an effort to help fix the city’s pollution problems.
