Uber halts self-driving car trials after crash

Uber has halted its self-driving cars from the Arizona roads after an accident which left one of the vehicles on its side.

Pictures posted online showed the car on its right side on an Arizona street, next to another badly damaged vehicle.

The car – a Volvo SUV – was in self-driving mode at the time of the crash, on Friday, Uber said. No one was hurt.

According to police who spoke to Bloomberg, the company’s car wasn’t at fault; a second car failed to yield for the Uber and caused it to flip over.

A spokeswoman for the police in Tempe, Arizona said the accident occurred when another vehicle “failed to yield” to the Uber car at a left turn.

“There was a person behind the wheel. It is uncertain at this time if they were controlling the vehicle at the time of the collision,” spokeswoman Josie Montenegro said.

The company says that there were no serious injuries and that the SUV didn’t have any backseat passengers.

Uber first began testing its self-driving cabs in Pittsburgh in August 2016, and launched trials in Tempe in February after it was invited to do so by Arizona Governor Doug Ducey.

One of the company’s autonomous vehicles previously ran a red light; Uber claims this was due to human error, but that has since been refuted by The New York Times.

The company is also being sued by Waymo, a self-driving tech firm owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, for allegedly stealing a key component of its proprietary autonomous navigation technology.