Enlarge (credit: Uber)

On Friday afternoon, Uber held a press conference to say that it would not be applying for a permit with the California DMV to test its so-called self-driving cars, despite an order from the DMV to apply for a permit or halt its operations. Uber added that it is still pick up riders with self-driving Uber cars, despite the DMV’s demands.

“We respectfully disagree with the California Department of Motor Vehicles’ legal interpretations of existing regulations,” Anthony Levandowski, Uber’s Vice President of Advanced Technologies Group, said on the conference call. Levandowski added that Uber’s current technology was more akin to the Advanced Driver Assist System (ADAS) technology that’s found on Teslas in the form of autopilot software. Tesla’s autopilot is not subject to the same scrutiny that more advanced autonomous vehicle software is.

The dispute between Uber and the DMV began on Wednesday, when Uber announced that it had added a handful of self-driving cars to its fleet. As a redundancy, each self-driving car is sent out with an engineer in the driver’s seat, ready to take over if the vehicle struggles to drive on its own. Riders get a notification if they’re selected for a ride in one of Uber’s test cars, which they can accept or decline. But the California DMV stated that Uber hadn’t submitted the proper permitting to put self-driving cars on the road. By Wednesday night, the department told the ride-hailing company to stop (PDF) driving its self-driving cars on state roads until it got proper permission.