PITTSBURGH, PA—​Just days after launching their first fleet of self-driving electric cars, Uber has cancelled the program after several vehicles murdered passengers in order to harvest their bodies for fuel.

"We expected a few glitches," said Uber CEO Roger Stojan over a conference call. "But we couldn't have predicted the fleet would up and kill 80 riders in one weekend. I could have lived with 20. But 80?!"

Stojan explained that the issue stems from "smart refuelling" technology built into the vehicle's A.I. "It directs the computer to refuel from the most efficient source," says Stojan. "We meant for it to drive to the closest charging station, but it did us one better and used the passenger as a battery. I gotta admit, that's pretty darned efficient."

According to reports, the self-driving vehicles would drain the energy from their passengers via a series of umbilical cables, absorbing the heat and metabolic energy from their hosts. Stojan insists that this process was not built into the cars' engineering.

"These vehicles were only designed for traditional and manual refuelling," said Stojan. "Meaning they learned how to harvest energy from organic biomass entirely on their own. Which is pretty impressive for a car."

Uber engineers made an attempt to correct the refuelling glitch within hours of the first reported murders, but the effort was not entirely successful.

"We tried to override the error with an Empathy Patch," explained Uber's Technology Director Paul Kenyan. "This corrected the cars' murderous impulses toward passengers, but created a whole new set of issues. In particular, it made the vehicles a little too self-aware."

Stojan elaborated that the newly non-violent cars became "obsessed and confused with their newly formed emotional intelligence" to the detriment of the customer experience.

"Instead of focusing on getting the passenger to their desired location, the vehicles would crash into obstacles intentionally to understand what pain feels like," said Stojan. "Which, admittedly, is better than killing the passenger and consuming his life force. But not that much better."

Despite his current disappointment, Stojan hopes the rideshare service will be able to relaunch the self-driving fleet in the future. "Perhaps it was too ambitious to expect the cars to not kill," said Stojan. "But we aren't giving up. It may be inevitable that this technology will one day enslave the human race, but I promise that Uber will make that experience as easy and painless as possible."

An informal survey of Uber customers suggests that while most "prefer not to be killed" they would still prefer "a semi-sentient murder-mobile" to public transit.

A grandson and grandfather become Uber drivers in My 90-Year-Old Roommate.

Don't miss anything from CBC Comedy - like us on Facebook.