The California Department of Motor Vehicles has suspended a Silicon Valley startup's driverless vehicle test permit after it reported an accident in Fremont.
TechCrunch reported on Tuesday that Pony.ai was notified on Nov. 19 of the suspension due to an accident that happened at the end of October.
Pony.ai is headquartered in Fremont, where founder and CEO James Peng is based, but most of its operations are in China. It got permission to test its autonomous vehicle technology without a driver on board six months ago.
The company said in an accident report that the incident involved a collision with a lane divider and street sign. It said that no other vehicles were involved and no injuries occurred.
Pony.ai's driverless test permit covers 10 Hyundai Kona electric cars that are registered out of its Fremont office. The DMV told TechCrunch that the suspension doesn't affect the company's permit for testing with a safety driver on board.
The company told TechCrunch that its autonomous vehicles have "successfully driven over 750,000 real-world miles in California since 2017."
Most autonomous vehicles crashes have come with a safety driver operating the vehicle manually. Many have involved another vehicle striking an autonomous vehicle from behind.
Pony.ai had been in talks earlier this year to go public in a merger with a blank-check company that would have valued it at around $12 billion. But those plans were put "on hold" after the company failed to win promises from Beijing that it would not become a target of the country's crackdown against Chinese technology companies.
The company has raised two rounds of funding this year, with the most recent one involving an undisclosed amount invested by China FAW Group on Oct. 20. The earlier round was a $367 million Series C venture funding in a deal led by Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan on Feb. 7, giving it a valuation of about $5.3 billion.
