Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar have won the latest battle over government regulation after the California Department of Motor Vehicles retracted a controversial memo telling the companies’ drivers they needed to register their cars as commercial vehicles.
“We jumped the gun, and we shouldn’t have,” California DMV Director Jean Shiomoto said in a statement emailed to The Huffington Post on Saturday.
The DMV’s reversal came shortly after all three companies spoke out against a memo the department released earlier this month reminding drivers that “any passenger vehicle used or maintained for the transportation of persons for hire, compensation or profit is a commercial vehicle,” and that “even occasional use of a vehicle in this manner requires the vehicle to be registered commercially.” The notice did not introduce a new law, DMV spokesman Artemio Armenta told HuffPost, but instead referenced a code that has been in place since 1935.
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Requiring commercial plates “would essentially treat peer-to-peer transportation the same as a taxi,” said Lyft spokeswoman Chelsea Wilson.
This debate is only the latest disagreement over whether rideshare companies should be regulated the same way as traditional taxis, whose drivers have been some of the most outspoken opponents of TNCs. Last month, district attorneys in San Francisco and Los Angeles sued Uber for conducting faulty background checks on its drivers and for a number of other violations, including illegally operating at airports and charging fraudulent airport fees.
