The most explosive allegation yet in Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber hinges entirely on chronology.
The most explosive allegation yet in Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber $UBER hinges entirely on chronology.
Waymo, the driverless car unit spun off by Alphabet $GOOGL’s Google, sued Uber in February for misappropriating trade secrets and infringing on patents pertaining to its proprietary lidar technology. Lidar, as in “light radar,” is the component of self-driving car technology that essentially helps the vehicle see. Waymo has said Anthony Levandowski, its former employee and a current Uber engineer, downloaded 14,000 confidential documents before he quit the company in January 2016. Levandowski went on to found Otto, a driverless trucking startup, which was later acquired by Uber.
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In its initial complaint, Waymo alleged that Uber ”leveraged stolen information” from the Otto acquisition to jumpstart its own in-house lidar. But in a public hearing in San Francisco on May 3, Waymo attorney Charles Verhoeven, took the claim a step further. “It is clear now,” he told the judge, “that at the time of the download, Uber and Mr. Levandowski were planning to build a replica lidar system for Uber. It turns out, through discovery, we’ve learned that Uber and Levandowski, together, created a cover-up scheme for what they were doing. They created a story for public consumption.”
In other words, Waymo is now alleging that Otto was only ever a shell company set up by Levandowski and acquired by Uber as a vehicle for gaining intellectual property stolen from Waymo. US district court judge William Alsup is expected to rule this week on both Waymo’s request for a preliminary injunction and Uber’s motion to push the case to arbitration. A preliminary injunction could potentially halt Uber’s work on self-driving cars, and the company is desperate to avoid one. Late last month, Uber demoted Levandowski from head of self-driving technologies and said he would be recused from any work on lidar through the remainder of the Waymo litigation.
Below are key events, summarized from court documents and media reports, that show how Waymo reached the dramatic conclusion in its trade secrets lawsuit against Uber.
Alsup was initially wowed by Waymo’s mound of evidence. “I have never seen a record this strong in 42 years,” he said in a hearing last month. On May 3, he was more skeptical. “Part of the problem is that your best proof is against Levandowski,” Alsup told Waymo’s attorneys. “But here’s the thing. You didn’t sue him. You sued Uber.” He added: “All that has been proven is he downloaded 14,00 documents. … You don’t have any smoking gun.”
