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Uber Shutting Down Self-Driving Operations In Arizona After Fatal Crash (azcentral.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Arizona Republic: Uber is shutting down its self-driving car tests in Arizona, where one of the cars was involved in a fatal crash with a pedestrian in March, the company said Wednesday. The company notified about 300 Arizona workers in the self-driving program that they were being terminated just before 9 a.m. Wednesday. The shutdown should take several weeks. Test drivers for the autonomous cars have not worked since the accident in Tempe, but Uber said they continued to be paid. The company's self-driving trucks have also been shelved since the accident. Uber plans to restart testing self-driving cars in Pittsburgh once federal investigators conclude their inquiry into the Tempe crash. The company also said it is having discussions with California leaders to restart testing.
If I were a mayor or town manager I'd ban them.
That's what San Francisco did before the Arizona accident. It specifically banned Uber back in December because its self-driving car ran a red light. See video (wait until the 10 seconds mark).
After that, Uber was allowed to test in California, just not in San Francisco. After the Arizona accident, Arizona, California, and one other State pulled Uber's permit to test cars on their public streets.
Now Uber can only do testing on its own private track with fake pedestrians and fake bicyclists, and I really doubt that it will ever be allowed to test its cars on the public roads in California again. Thankfully, there are 50 other self-driving car companies in the US. And in the San Francisco Bay Area, I now see 7 different types of self-driving cars which seem to multiplying in numbers, I just no longer see the Uber ones anymore.