Uber v Google: Self-drive tech clash heads to court

A trial pitting two of the biggest players in self-drive technology against each other has begun in San Francisco.

Ride-sharing firm Uber is being sued by Waymo, the self-driving company spun out of Google.

Uber is accused of stealing and using trade secrets relating to Lidar (light detection and ranging) - one of the technologies that enables an autonomous car to understand what is happening around it.

Waymo is making its case first, and then it will be up to Uber to defend itself.

Emails already shown in court detailed Uber’s ex-chief executive Travis Kalanick demanding “pounds of flesh” from Waymo, while others are said to involve him saying he wanted to “find the cheat codes”.

Waymo’s legal team has compared Mr Kalanick to Rosie Ruiz, a runner who cheated in the 1980 New York Marathon by taking the subway.

Uber will likely begin its defence next week. It is expected the company will not dispute document theft, but instead attempt to convince the jury it did not use the information in its self-drive experiments.

While bitter and expensive legal disputes between tech companies are common, it’s rare for these tussles to be played out in public.

The case is expected to last about three weeks.

At stake is a potential damages payout of hundreds of millions of dollars. Or, perhaps worse, an injunction to halt, or at least hinder, Uber’s self-driving research. This would be a big blow to the company, which once said leading the way in self-driving tech was critical to its survival.

The row centres around a man named Anthony Levandowski, a former Google employee considered a leading mind in autonomous research.

He worked on Google’s self-driving programme before leaving in January 2016. It is alleged that when he left, he took with him more than 14,000 confidential documents, which were blueprints and other technical information about Lidar.

He then founded Otto, an autonomous trucking company, which after less than a year was acquired by Uber for $680m. It formed the basis of Uber’s self-driving division, and Mr Levandowski was at the helm.

Waymo alleges this whole process was an elaborate charade, and that Uber, specifically thenchief executive Travis Kalanick, was in talks with Mr Levandowski before he left Google.

Otto was merely a front for Uber’s plan to pinch their technology, Waymo claims.

Uber denies this version of events, though not entirely. It’s not disputing the documents were taken, but insists it didn’t gain anything whatsoever from them.

The crucial point Waymo will need to prove is that not only did Uber have the documents, but that it used them to gain an advantage of some kind.