Google Sues Uber Over Self-Driving Car

  Google and Uber who started off as partners are now rivals. These two opponents are in a serious legal battle to control the future of transportation.

The Google self-driving-car group, now called Waymo, accused Uber of using stolen technology to facilitate its own autonomous-car development.


The suit, filed in the US District Court in San Francisco, alleges that a team of ex-Google engineers took away the company’s design for the “lidar” laser sensor that allows self-driving cars to map the domain around them.

“Misappropriating this technology is akin to stealing a secret recipe from a beverage company,” Waymo wrote in a post announcing the suit, which names both Uber and Otto, a startup Uber acquired, as defendants.

Google self-driving-car

“Otto and Uber have taken Waymo’s intellectual property so that they could avoid incurring the risk, time, and expense of independently developing their own technology. Ultimately, this calculated theft reportedly netted Otto employees over half a billion dollars and allowed Uber to revive a stalled program, all at Waymo’s expense,” the 28-page lawsuit says.

The complaint indicates the recent upswingin the increasingly opposed relationship between the two technology giants and shows the big stakes involved in self-driving-car technology, which foreshadows to transpose the 70 billion USD automotive industry.

“We take the allegations made against Otto and Uber employees seriously and we will review this matter carefully,” Uber wrote in a statement to Business Insider.

A suspicious email

At the center of the suit is Anthony Levandowski, one of the original members of the team that worked on Google’s self-driving-car project.

In January 2016, Levandowski left Google after nine years to found Otto, a startup focused on autonomous trucks. Then six months later, Uber acquired Otto in a deal valued at 680 million USD.

Waymo claims that Levandowski “downloaded over 14, 000 highly confidential and proprietary design files for Waymo’s various hardware systems, containing designs of Waymo’s LiDAR and circuit board” six weeks before resigning from Google.

Levandowski has been said to have installed specialized software on his company laptop to have access to Waymo’s design server, Waymo claims in the suit. He then downloaded 9.7GB of very confidential files and trade secrets that included blueprints, design files, and testing documentation, the suit claims.

In the suit, Waymo said that it learned of the theft after it was inadvertenly copied on an email that included machine drawings of what appeared to be Uber’s lidar circuit board that “bears a striking resemblance” to Waymo’s own designs.

Waymo also claims that former employees now working at Otto and Uber downloaded “additional highly confidential information” related to its lidar system, including manufacturing details, suppliers lists, and statements of work with highly technical information.

Google’s self-driving-car prototypes used third-party laser sensors made by Velodyne for years. However in early January the company announced that it was building its own lidar system in-house, which allowed it to reduce the price of the seriously expensive system by 90%.

A rough history

The lawsuit marks the recent escalation in the rough relationship between the two technology giants.

Google Ventures invested 250 million USD in Uber in 2013, when the ride-hailing services was still in its early years. But as the two companies business interests began to overlap, especially around self-driving cars, the relationship began to fray.

[naijapr]