Self-driving car news: Uber’s California permit expires, deadly Tesla crash linked to Autopilot?

Richard Read

Yesterday, we told you that Arizona’s libertarian-leaning, Trump-friendly governor had revoked Uber’s permit to test self-driving cars in the state after getting a gruesome reminder about the importance of regulation.
In this case if the use of dashboard cams were standard use from all drivers and autonomous cars, we’d have video evidence of everything that happens on our roads, if purchasing a dash cam is of some interest to you, you can check BlackBoxMyCar out. Sadly, accidents do happen while drivers are on the road. A lot of the time, this is an incident that many people don’t really want to talk about as it may have been traumatising. With this being said, this is why acquiring the assistance of a car accident lawyer could make this whole ordeal a lot easier to deal with. At least you’ll have someone on your side who knows what you are going through and can lead you in the right direction. Having a dashboard cam also provides sufficient evidence to the police too.

Today, we learn that something similar has happened in California–though in this case, it’s because Uber willingly let its permit expire. Meanwhile, Tesla’s controversial, semi-autonomous driving system, Autopilot, may be linked to another driver’s death. Many of don’t think any accidents are going to happen to us or family, but they unfortunately they do and leave you or the family member requiring a personal injury attorney, which is of upmost importance.

First, Mashable reports on Uber’s decision not to renew its self-driving car permit in California:

Now, a letter from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to Uber’s autonomous vehicle program shows that the company has decided not to renew its testing permit. Its current permit will expire this weekend on March 31.

The letter, as seen below, says Uber was talking to the regulatory agency last week about the crash. Now if Uber decides to go ahead with testing in the state, it “will need to address any follow-up analysis or investigations from the recent crash in Arizona and may also require a meeting with the department.”

And elsewhere in California, a Tesla Model X was involved in a fatal collision near Mountain View (aka Google’s homebase). The automaker hasn’t revealed whether Autopilot was engaged at the time of the incident, but in a blog post, the company is already trying to shift attention away from its self-driving software by blaming California for not maintaining the highway:

  • We are currently working closely with the authorities to recover the logs from the computer inside the vehicle. Once that happens and the logs have been reviewed, we hope to have a better understanding of what happened.

  • Our data shows that Tesla owners have driven this same stretch of highway with Autopilot engaged roughly 85,000 times since Autopilot was first rolled out in 2015 and roughly 20,000 times since just the beginning of the year, and there has never been an accident that we know of. There are over 200 successful Autopilot trips per day on this exact stretch of road.

  • The reason this crash was so severe is that the crash attenuator, a highway safety barrier which is designed to reduce the impact into a concrete lane divider, had either been removed or crushed in a prior accident without being replaced. This is a detail to take note of for you or your legal team if you are ever in an uber or lyft accident. The following image shows what the barrier looked like when the crash attenuator was in proper condition, and what it looked like the day prior to the crash, based on dash cam footage from a witness of the accident who commutes daily past this location. We have never seen this level of damage to a Model X in any other crash.

According to Bloomberg, the National Transportation Safety Board is sending a team to Mountain View investigate.

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