Uber has been forced to remove its self-driving vehicles from San Francisco roads, after the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) revoked the registration of the autonomous cars.

It comes just days after the California DMV made it clear that Uber’s self-driving cars needed a permit to be on the roads – like the 20 other companies within the state with self-driving programs. Uber argued that it did not require a permit because its vehicles still have a driver present.

An Uber spokesperson said: “We have stopped our self-driving pilot in California as the DMV has revoked the registrations for our self-driving cars. We’re now looking at where we can redeploy these cars but remain 100 percent committed to California and will be redoubling our efforts to develop workable statewide rules.”

Uber unleashed its fleet of 16 autonomous cars onto the San Francisco roads last week, as it began trialling the vehicles in a second city, following on from its initial driverless trial in Pittsburgh which launched in September.

Uber’s lack of permit not impress officials – who already had a bone to pick with the transportation network over traffic congestion in the San Francisco area – but Uber remained defiant.

In a statement on Uber’s newsroom, Anthony Levandowski, head of Uber’s advanced technology group, said: “We respectfully disagree with the California Department of Motor Vehicles legal interpretation of today’s autonomous regulations, in particular that Uber needs a testing permit to operate its self-driving cars in San Francisco.

“The regulations apply to ‘autonomous vehicles’. And autonomous vehicles are defined as cars equipped with technology that can — and I quote — ‘drive a vehicle without the active physical control or monitoring by a human operator.’ But the self-driving Ubers that we have in both San Francisco and Pittsburgh today are not capable of driving ‘without … active physical control or monitoring’.”

However, such statements fall on deaf ears when videos emerge of Uber self-driving cars running red lights.