Block Uber's self-driving car project, Waymo asks federal court

Waymo claimed that Uber could be using stolen technology

Waymo, the self-driving car business spun out of Google’s parent company last year, has asked a federal court to block Uber’s work on a competing self-driving vehicle that Waymo claimed could be using stolen technology.

Waymo also filed testimony from employees and a Google security engineer describing how Anthony Levandowski, a former Google executive, discussed Uber’s interest in the technology and systematically stole proprietary company documents. In February 2016, Levandowski left to start his own self-driving truck company, Otto. He sold it to Uber for $680 million six months later.

Waymo sued Uber last month, accusing the ride-hailing company of colluding with Levandowski to steal crucial parts of Waymo’s technology to accelerate its development of autonomous vehicles.

Gary Brown, Google’s security engineer specialising in forensics, said in a partially redacted declaration that Levandowski searched Google’s network in December 2015 for login details to a document repository for “Chauffeur,” the internal code name for the driverless car project.

Levandowski then installed special software that allowed him to access that repository and proceeded to download over 14,000 files, or about 9.7 gigabytes of data, according to the declaration. A few days later, Levandowski attached a memory card to his laptop for eight hours, Brown said.

Levandowski, along with former Google employees Sameer Kshirsagar and Radu Raduta, gained access to a Google Drive folder containing company files and exported documents about suppliers to a personal device, according to the declaration. Soon after, they left the company for Otto, Brown said in his testimony. Waymo asked the federal court here for a preliminary injunction against Otto and Uber. A hearing for the injunction motion is scheduled for April 27.

Waymo said in its initial lawsuit that it was inadvertently copied on an email from a supplier with blueprints of Uber’s circuit board design for its lidar technology, or light detection and ranging sensors, used in self-driving cars. Waymo said Uber’s designs bore “a striking resemblance” to its secret designs. In another partially redacted declaration filed with the court, Pierre-Yves Droz, a hardware engineer at Waymo, said Levandowski, while still with Google, told him that he wanted long-range lidar for his start-up and that he wanted to “replicate” Waymo’s technology.

Droz said this did not surprise him because Levandowski had told him earlier that he wanted to start a self-driving car company and that Uber would be interested in “buying the team” responsible for the lidar being developed at Google.

Levandowski, Kshirsagar and Raduta could not be reached for comment. 

©2017 The New York Times News Service