More than 100 Uber employees who piloted the company’s nascent self-driving cars in Pittsburgh and San Francisco were laid off on Wednesday afternoon, four months after one such vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona.
The layoffs are the latest scale-back of the company’s autonomous vehicle testing program, following other cuts that collectively have slashed the number of autonomous vehicle operators from roughly 400 to 55. Former and current employees expect future testing to follow much more limited routes.
