Uber Won’t Renew Autonomous-Vehicle License for California

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Uber Technologies Inc. won’t renew a license to operate self-driving cars in California while the company evaluates how one of its vehicles killed a pedestrian in Arizona last week.

The San Francisco-based company told the California Department of Motor Vehicles that it will let its license expire at the end of the month, according to a letter from the department’s deputy director. The self-driving car program is under intense scrutiny following a collision on March 18 that killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona. All of Uber’s autonomous-vehicle tests have been on pause since the incident.

The DMV told Uber that a new permit application would need to address what investigators find out about the Tempe crash. Uber has said that it is cooperating with Tempe police and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — both of which are investigating. On Monday, Arizona’s governor banned Uber from operating self-driving cars on state roads, creating another barrier for the program’s eventual return.

“We proactively suspended our self-driving operations, including in California, immediately following the Tempe incident,” Matt Kallman, an Uber spokesman, said in a statement. “Given this, we decided not to reapply for a California DMV permit with the understanding that our self-driving vehicles would not operate on public roads in the immediate future.”