Uber’s recent internal, PR, and legal troubles have been mounting at a shocking rate over recent months, but this week brings the newest layer of bad news to plague the ride sharing company.
Specifically, they concern Alphabet’s subsidiary Waymo, who at the time was known simply as Google’s self-driving car project. The New York Times reported that Waymo and Lyft, Uber’s main competitor in the United States, have inked a partnership to further autonomous vehicle technology, challenging Uber’s own development efforts that so far have not been without incident.
The potential for Lyft, with Waymo’s expertise, to surge past Uber’s own self-driving program is substantial, but more intriguing is that it represents the first official move by both companies to jointly compete against the embattled market leader.
A spokeswoman told the Times: “Waymo holds today’s best self-driving technology, and collaborating with them will accelerate our shared vision of improving lives with the world’s best transportation. Lyft’s vision and commitment to improving the way cities move will help Waymo’s self-driving technology reach more people, in more places.”
In the transition to become a technology company in addition to a ride-sharing service, Uber has had to start from scratch, and on the sophistication of their autonomous systems are still a fair bit at a disadvantage to other big players in this sector.
Months ago, a man named Anthony Levandowski left his position at Google to found Otto, a self-driving start-up. In February 2017, Waymo sued Uber - who acquired Otto last August - claiming that Levandowski had stolen a significant amount of confidential files from what was then known as Google’s self-driving division before his departure.
Yesterday, San Francisco judge William Alsup ruled in favour of Google’s sister company upon being presented with enough evidence that “its former star engineer" had “pilfered” thousands of trade sensitive documents.
Reuters obtained a statement from Alsup, saying: "The bottom line is the evidence indicates that Uber hired Levandowski even though it knew or should have known that he possessed over 14,000 confidential Waymo files likely containing Waymo's intellectual property,"
Following this, Uber has been ordered to bar all employees, Levandowski included, from using any of the stolen materials or technology (mostly surrounding Lidar) that have stemmed from it as well as return the files (reported to be around 9.7GB worth of data) to Waymo by May 31st. Alsup also ruled that Uber conduct a full investigation and furnish Waymo with a “comprehensive log of written and spoken communication between Uber and Levandowski regarding Lidar.”
