A lawsuit against Uber highlights the hurry to conquer driverless cars

SELF-DRIVING CAR EXPERIMENT

LATE LAST year, Uber, in defiance of California state regulators, went ahead with a self-driving car experiment on the streets of San Francisco under the leadership of Anthony Levandowski, a new company executive.

The experiment quickly ran into problems. In one case, an autonomous Volvo zoomed through a red light on a busy street in front of the city’s Museum of Modern Art.

Uber, a ride-hailing service, said the incident was because of human error. “This is why we believe so much in making the roads safer by building self-driving Ubers,” Chelsea Kohler, a company spokeswoman, said in December. But even though Uber said it had suspended an employee riding in the Volvo, the self-driving car was, in fact, driving itself when it barrelled through the red light, according to two Uber employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they signed nondisclosure agreements with the company, and internal Uber documents viewed by The New York Times. All told, the mapping programs used by Uber’s cars failed to recognise six traffic lights in the San Francisco area. “In this case, the car went through a red light,” the documents said.

The description of the traffic violation reflects Uber’s aggressiveness in its efforts around selfdriving cars and the ambition of its project leader, Levandowski, who is now at the center of a lawsuit brought against Uber by Waymo, an autonomous car business. Waymo is Google’s cousin company under their parent entity, Alphabet.

The legal battle also provides a rare glimpse into the highstakes world of top technology talent, where star engineers like Levandowski, who played a central role in Google’s pioneering autonomous car project, command huge sums of money to try to help define a company’s technological future.

After leaving Google in January 2016, Levandowski formed the self-driving truck company Otto. About six months later, Uber bought Otto for $680 million,andlevandowskibecame Uber’s vice president in charge of its self-driving car project.

Waymo filed a lawsuit on Thursday in federal court against Uber and Otto, accusing Levandowski and Uber of planning to steal trade secrets.

The suit said Levandowski retrieved information from a highly confidential server with designs of crucial technologies used in its autonomous vehicles in the month before he resigned from Google, where he had spent nine years working on maps and self-driving cars.

There are increasing signs that autonomous cars have arrived — and may be driving our city streets sooner than we think.

Alphabet and Uber view autonomous vehicles as using critical technology that may upend the automobile industry. Google started working on driverless cars around the time when Uber was formed, and Google is eager to prove that, despite its size and past successes, it can still innovate like a start-up. And replacing human drivers with selfdriving cars would allow Uber to theoretically provide safer rides around the clock. Robot cars would also allow the ride-hailing service to avoid one of its biggest headaches — its drivers.

“There’s an urgency to our missionaboutbeingpartofthefuture,”traviskalanick,uber’schief executive, said in an interview in August after announcing Otto’s acquisition.“thisisnotasideproject. This is existential for us.”

Engineers like Levandowski are part of a limited pool of people with the experience and capability to lead efforts on selfdriving cars. They are wooed by traditional automakers looking to acquire new technical talent and tech companies, both established firms and start-ups, who see the opportunity to use artificial intelligence and sensors to disrupt another industry.

“What’s in these people’s heads is hugely in demand,” because the talent pool “just doesn’t have enough miles under the wheels,” said Martha Josephson, a partner in the Palo Alto, California, office of Egon Zehnder, an executive recruiting firm.

In fact, Sebastian Thrun, who founded Google’s self-driving car project and is now the chief executive of the online teaching start-up Udacity, said last year that the going rate for driverless car engineering talent was about $10 million a person.

Current and former co-workers of Levandowski, who asked for anonymity because they did not have permission to speak to reporters, said he was aggressive and determined with an entrepreneurial streak. Since leaving Google, Levandowski, 36, has embodied the Silicon Valley ethos that it is better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.

Uber said in a statement that the lawsuit was a “baseless attempt to slow down a competitor,” and declined to make Levandowski available. But in an internal email to Uber employees obtained by The New York Times, Levandowski said that Otto did not steal any of Google’s intellectual property, and that self-driving technology has been his life’s passion, having worked on it since his college days. NYT

Reuters Robot cars would also allow Uber to avoid one of its biggest headaches — its drivers.