> Levandowski seemed to struggle in other ways as well. In December, Uber dispatched 16 self-driving cars, with safety drivers, in San Francisco without seeking a permit from the California DMV. The test went poorly—on the first day, a self-driving car ran a red light, and the DMV ordered Uber to halt its program in the state.

> The company suffered further embarrassment when a New York Times article, citing leaked documents, suggested that Uber’s explanation for the traffic violation—that it had been caused by human error—wasn’t complete. The car malfunctioned, and the driver failed to stop it.

> The misdirection came as no surprise to the Uber employees who’d spent time at Otto’s San Francisco headquarters. Someone there had distributed stickers—in OSHA orange—with a tongue-in-cheek slogan: “Safety third.”

In 2016 they tried just turning their autonomous vehicles loose in SF without regulatory approval. They got shut down. Rather than apply for permits, they headed off to Arizona, where the then-new governor welcomed them with open arms, an "anything-goes approach", and a lot of anti-regulation blather: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/11/technology/arizona-tech-i...

I would be surprised under the new CEO.

I mean, there ought to be the point at which someone says, "this company has a long, consistent, documented history of antisocial behaviour and complete disrespect for law, therefore they shall not be allowed to work on this society-changing and life-critical technology". That this doesn't happen is, I feel, a failure of our society/regulatory apparatus.

For instance, plug-in devices must have fuses. The standard gives no guidance about the right size of fuses, but a reasonable engineer would of course pick a good size. The standard’s main effect is to avoid cutting safety features to save cost.

We shipped a mobile office robot. We sweated the details of it not running into people or crashing, but the UL cert only verified that we had fuses and flame-retardant plastics and the like.