Uber's Self-Driving Car Ambitions Live Another Day
SAN FRANCISCO — Uber and Waymo's industry-critical battle over self-driving car technology now includes allegations of cover-ups, clandestine meetings and big stock payouts. But a court hearing May 3 didn't result in one possible outcome: A halt to Uber's self-driving car plans.
In arguments before U.S. District Judge William Alsup, attorneys for both parties laid out their case related to Waymo's request for a temporary injunction against Uber that would force the ride-hailing company to stop testing its autonomous cars. The day ended without a decision from Alsup.
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Waymo, originally Google’s autonomous vehicle division, has accused one of the best engineers in the field, Anthony Levandowski, of stealing 14,000 documents from it and then moving on to Uber when the ride-hailing company bought Levandowski's new self-driving truck company, Otto, last summer.
Waymo claims the engineer built his company on the back of its proprietary designs for LiDAR, or light detection and ranging, sensors that let self-driving cars “see” where they are.
Uber has countered that it has never used any such documents in creating its LiDAR. So far, the judge seems unconvinced of Waymo's allegations.
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“You have no proof that shows a chain, that shows Levandowski saying ‘Here’s how we did it, here’s how we should do it,'" Alsup told Waymo's legal team. “What if it turns out that Uber is totally innocent and the worst thing they did was pay a lot of money to buy a brilliant guy from a competitor without realizing that he’d downloaded all this information?”
Legal experts say the burden of proof remains on Waymo to prove Uber was behind a well-orchestrated and clandestine plot to steal its technology.
"The thumb on the scale here is in favor of the defendant, in that Waymo needs to show that its business will be done irreparable harm if other steps aren't taken" to stop Uber's self-driving research, says Michael Brophy, an intellectual property attorney from Withers Bergman.
Brophy says "the evidence for the judge needs to be direct, not circumstantial."
The battle between these two well-known technology companies is critical for a number of reasons.
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First, it could determine a winner in the hotly contested race to develop commercially viable self-driving car technology, which in turn could unlock billions in revenue in a future transportation economy that is powered by robot-driven vehicles.
Uber raced into the field in the past few years, fueled by a desire to develop a more profitable business model that did not include paying drivers. It hired top scientists and last summer started picking up passengers in Pittsburgh.
Waymo has been testing for eight years, and recently announced it was piloting a program with 600 self-driving cars that will soon begin picking up passengers in Phoenix.
Second, it could signal a more closed approach to developing potentially lucrative intellectual property, a change for an open-source industry that long has prided itself on sharing code and other insights to accelerate the pace of innovation.
And lastly, the result could be yet another damning indictment of Uber, which in recent months has been hit with a series of scandals that range from accusations of running a sexist workplace to admissions of creating proprietary programs used to thwart regulators and rivals.
$250 million in stock
Waymo came out swinging May 3, with attorney Charles Verhoeven accusing Uber of an elaborate cover-up scheme to hide the fact that Brian McClendon, Uber’s vice president of mapping, had been in talks with Levandowski before he abruptly left Google’s self-driving car unit in January of 2016.
Verhoeven argued that Levandowski and Uber were actually secretly planning and negotiating a deal that would allow Levandowsky to take the knowledge about LiDAR he had developed at Waymo and apply it to building a LiDAR system at Uber.
In an effort to further tie Levandowski to Uber, Waymo's lawyer also pointed out that Uber gave Levandowski 5.3 million shares of Uber stock dated the day after he quit Google “without giving notice,” stock that was worth $250 million at the time.
But Uber later clarified that the stock was actually given to Levandowski after he was hired by Uber but was backdated to the date months earlier when he founded Otto. Uber said such back dating to when a person originally joined a company that was being acquired is common.
The typically fiery Alsup was quick to raise hypothetical questions for both sides. In the matter of the 14,000 allegedly stolen files, which Uber has said never touched its servers, Alsup asked whether Levandowski was able to bring a personal laptop to his job at Uber.
“Maybe he’s sitting there having a conversation with somebody and then he consults a document that came from Waymo, not using the company laptop, and says ‘Why don’t we try it this way?’ Never using the word Google and never saying the word Waymo. I’m not saying that happened, but it’s an easy scenario to imagine,” he said.
Meanwhile, Uber attorney Arturo Gonzalez began his statements by asserting that Waymo hasn’t been able to show that Uber has acquired any of its technology and that everything the company has said in court is circumstantial.
“They’re going to do digging and digging and more digging and they’re never going to find proof that those [files] found their way to Uber,” he said. “We are adamant that we did not use any of their trade secrets. Despite all the documents Waymo has seen, what have they found? Nothing."
Even though Levandowski has chosen to take the Fifth Amendment and not answer questions on the matter for fear of self-incrimination, Waymo has taken depositions from eleven Uber engineers and none have said they got information about Waymo’s LiDAR from Levankowski, Gonzalez said.
“There is no evidence that anybody at Uber knew anything about these 14,000 files before this lawsuit was filed,” he said.
Waymo argued that there is a potential threatened harm that requires an injunction to keep Uber from possibly benefiting from the ill-gotten files.
Uber answered that the law requires there be a threat of imminent misuse, that Waymo must prove that Levandowski has or intends to misuse the trade secrets — which it says Waymo hasn’t done.
In the end, Alsup ended the day without issuing an injunction. The case could still go to arbitration. But it could also go to a jury trial in the fall.
“Then there will be a jury sitting over there,” he waved towards the side of the room. “It will be the American way.”
