It took less than a day for California to crack down on Uber's self-driving cars
Those self-driving Uber cars that started picking up passengers Wednesday morning in the company's hometown of San Francisco have already been ordered to pull over -- less than a day into the pilot program.
State regulators cracked down on the ride-hailing company's autonomous vehicle program that was knowingly operating without a permit. Uber hadn't registered for the Autonomous Vehicle Tester Program when the cars started driving this morning.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles later Wednesday sent a letter to Uber's Anthony Levandowski asking the company to cease operations immediately or face legal action.
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Uber had passed over the permitting process because they don't consider their cars "autonomous vehicles" due to the fact they have a person monitoring the car behind the wheel who can jump in if necessary. The company has been operating this way for several months in Pittsburgh.
"If Uber does not confirm immediately that it will stop its launch and seek a testing permit, DMV will initiate legal action," Brian Soublet, the California DMV deputy director and chief counsel, said in the letter. The DMV said they "fully" support autonomous vehicle technology, but it "must be tested responsibly."
The letter comes after a dash-cam video from a Luxor cab driver was posted on YouTube Wednesday, showing what it claimed was a driverless Uber vehicle running a red light.
Charles Rotter, an operations manager at the cab company, told Mashable he posted the video after it was passed along to him from one of his drivers.
Driver Jessica Felix said she was dropping someone off downtown when she saw the car cruise through the light at a pedestrian crossing. She said she noticed the distinct vehicle was marked as an Uber and had equipment on the roof. She spotted a person in the front seat and another on the passenger side, and said she couldn't see if anyone was in the back.
Initially, in response to the video, Uber told Mashable, "Safety is our top priority. This incident has been reported and we are looking into what happened."
Several hours later, Uber determined the incident was "due to human error" and that the car wasn't part of driverless pilot program. In an email statement to Mashable, Uber said, "This is why we believe so much in making the roads safer by building self-driving Ubers. This vehicle was not part of the pilot and was not carrying customers. The driver involved has been suspended while we continue to investigate."
In a separate incident that also took place Wednesday morning, a woman in a Lyft tweeted about what she thought was a self-driving Uber that crossed an intersection and almost hit her.
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The Associated Press contributed reporting.
Topics Self-Driving Cars Uber
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
