Why did Uber launch the self-driving in pilot in San Francisco if it knew it was in violation of the law? A likely scenario was that Uber didn’t want to disclose its disengagement rate — the number of times the vehicle forced the human driver to take control because it couldn’t safely navigate the conditions on the road — or any accidents to the DMV, and by extension the public. The company referred questions about the emails to comments made by Levandowski in a call with reporters last December.
The rest of the article is about how Uber kept lying to San Francisco. But, hey, lets throw lots of free public infrastructure at them because FUTURE.