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After several days of embarrassing stories of repeated traffic violations and several legal threats from state officials, Uber's self-driving car trial in San Francisco has been cancelled. The California DMV revoked their registrations.

San Francisco, California. On Wednesday, the state of California's Department of Motor Vehicles revoked 16 Uber car registrations. These vehicles were all under a commercial trial to test the viability of self-driving technology.

The 16 test cars were all equipped artificial intelligence autonomous driving technology, able to drive the car without any human intervention and input. However, the self-driven cars were not alone on the road as each vehicle had Uber employees inside monitoring the car's performance.

The DMV has revoked the registration on the grounds that they were "improperly issued" since the vehicles "were not properly marked as test vehicles." Moreover, the director of the DMV, Jean Shiomoto, offered to help the company apply for required permits. "I appreciate the action that Uber has taken in the interest of public safety," said the DMV director.

Currently, there are 20 other companies who are undergoing self-driving trials, all of which have the necessary permits. There has been some speculation that Uber has tried to avoid getting the necessary permits so that it did not have to disclose the results of their trial to the public.

Similarly, the mayor of San Francisco, Ed Lee, has similarly gone on record to say that he supported the removal of the self-driving cars. While being a "strong supporter of innovation and autonomous vehicle development and testing," the mayor has stated that this comes second only to road safety.

Uber officially launched their pilot program accessible to the riding public last week, strongly believing that they did not need self-driving permits since the cars have humans inside. Furthermore, Anthony Levandowsky, head of Uber's advanced technology group, has reasoned that the company's vehicles have "core safety capabilities" and "state-of-the-art" technology.

Despite these claims, it does not change the fact that within hours of their self-driving trial launch, a video was leaked of one of the vehicles running a red light in downtown San Francisco. One witness who saw the incident said that it nearly caused a collision.