Uber's showdown with California regulators is over, and the regulators won. For now.
After a week of legal threats, meetings, and very official letters, Uber announced late Wednesday that it would park the self-driving vehicles that have been providing rides in San Francisco. Legally, the company had little choice, because the state Department of Motor Vehicles officially revoked the registration on each of the 16 robo-cars after Uber brazenly refused to apply for an autonomous testing permit. Tough tactics aside, regulators did extend a hand in friendship.
"I want to reassure you that the California Department of Motor Vehicles stands ready to work with you collaboratively," DMV Director Jean Shiomoto wrote in a letter to Uber public affairs head Davis White. Shiomoto said her agency "dedicated a team to work with you to expedite the [testing permit] approval process."
As for Uber, well, it retreated to regroup. "We’re now looking at where we can redeploy these cars," an Uber spokesperson said in a statement, "but remain 100 percent committed to California and will be redoubling our efforts to develop workable statewide rules." The ridesharing giant continues providing rides to passengers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where it started deploying autonomous vehicles in August.
Uber began providing San Francisco robo-rides last week, arguing that a legal loophole allowed it to conveniently skip DMV permitting. (The state has granted such permits to 20 companies, including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, and the Chinese tech firm Baidu.) Uber's head of autonomous tech, Anthony Levandowski, argued that California's rules apply only to cars capable of full autonomy, and not to cars that have a human at the wheel to keep an eye on things. "We respectfully disagree with the California DMV’s legal interpretation of today’s automation regulations,” he said in a conference call Friday. The state's reply? It threatened to seek an injunction.
The state has muscle, but Uber has a clever argument. And it's enjoyed no small success simply steamrolling over local and state regulators in the past. But that may not be enough. "Uber’s argument is textually plausible but contextually untenable,” Bryant Walker Smith, an expert on autonomous vehicles at University of South Carolina School of Law, wrote last week.
But for now, California regulators can simply, and legally, revoke the registration of any vehicle deemed unsafe. And so Uber's fleet of tech-packed Volvo XC90 SUVs is idle. The company says it is open to the idea of applying for a permit, but at the moment has no plans to do so.
