Alphabet’s Waymo sues Uber over self-driving car secrets
Suit accuses truck company Otto of stealing plans
In charges that could undermine Uber’s self-driving car program, Alphabet Inc.’s autonomous car company Waymo has filed suit for trade secret misappropriation, patent infringement and unfair competition.
The lawsuit, filed last week, contends that former Google car engineer Anthony Levandowski stole 14,000 files of proprietary plans and technical specifications related to the company’s LiDAR sensors a month before starting Otto, a self-driving truck company.
Uber bought Otto last August for $670 million and put Levandowski in charge of its mushrooming autonomous car program.
In a blog post explaining the suit, Waymo officials said that “misappropriating this technology is akin to stealing a secret recipe from a beverage company.”
Uber’s responded by praising its teams’ efforts and called Waymo’s suit a “baseless attempt to slow down a competitor and we look forward to vigorously defending against them in court.”
Waymo has been working on self-driving car technology since 2009, and last year partnered with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles to deploy its commercial-grade sensors in a fleet of 100 Pacifica Hybrid minivans.
Uber has been playing catch up, in part by buying up talent. That includes hiring more than 40 robotics researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where Uber later established a research lab and this summer began testing its cars.
Buying Otto was a strategic move aimed at both securing Levandowski’s skills as well as entering the potentially lucrative trucking market, which powers the movement of U.S. goods but has a shortage of human drivers.