Uber driver gets stuck driving down stairs, blames Uber’s navigation system
An Uber driver took a wrong turn and ended up accidentally driving down the stairs leading out of a parking lot at a grocery store in San Francisco. The car, which had Uber passengers in it, ended up getting stuck and had to be towed away. The incident occurred Monday afternoon outside a Safeway in the city’s Upper Market area.
Uber confirmed that the driver was driving on behalf of the app at the time and that the car had two passengers. The trip was an Uber Pool, which allows multiple passengers to carpool together, and the car was headed to pick up a third passenger at the time the driver drove down the stairs.
None of the occupants of the car was injured. A spokesperson for Uber told MarketWatch that the company is aware of the incident, has gotten in touch with the parties involved and is looking into what happened. The driver reportedly told Business Insider he was following Uber’s navigation system at the time. He was quoted as having said the app’s software led him to drive down the stairs.
This is not the first time a car has gotten stuck on that set of stairs. A traditional taxi was once caught stuck on the stairs, according to a tweet from Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, a reporter in San Francisco. But the incident extends a series of bad news for the ride-hailing company. Last week, one of Uber’s self-driving cars struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Ariz.
And according to a report in the New York Times, Uber’s cars have been having trouble navigating in a variety of driving situations, including through construction zones and near tall vehicles. Uber’s human drivers have had to intervene far more frequently than the drivers of competing autonomous-car projects.
On Monday, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey ordered Uber to completely suspend testing autonomous vehicles on public roadways in the state.
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