Uber moves self-driving fleet to Arizona after program shut down in California
In mid-December, Uber added San Francisco to the list of cities where the company is聽. However, the ride-sharing giant on Thursday said it was moving the prototypes to Phoenix, Ariz.
Uber never obtained a permit for testing self-driving cars on California鈥檚 roads, arguing that the permit applies only to cars that can drive without someone controlling or monitoring them, which isn鈥檛 the case for the company鈥檚 prototypes yet. From a technology perspective, Uber says its prototypes operate in the same way as vehicles equipped with advanced driver assist technologies, for example Tesla [NSDQ:TSLA] cars equipped with Autopilot.
California鈥檚 DMV didn鈥檛 see it this way and chose to revoke the registration of the prototypes in Uber鈥檚 test fleet, in this case Volvo XC90s fitted with Uber鈥檚 own self-driving technology. It probably didn鈥檛 help Uber鈥檚 case that a video emerged showing one of the prototypes running a red light.
Following an invitation from Arizona Governor Doug Ducey sent on Wednesday, Uber started shipping the prototypes over to Phoenix using聽, a subsidiary of Uber developing self-driving technology for transport trucks. Uber hasn鈥檛 announced when the prototypes will start testing again, nor provided details about how many will be used. Uber previously had 16 of them registered in California.
Uber has successfully tested self-driving prototypes聽聽for the past several months. The company is also likely to start testing them in Michigan following the聽聽earlier in the month, the most lenient yet when it comes to self-driving cars.
This story originally appeared on .
