A Doozy of a Lawsuit Over Self-Driving Cars

In another astonishing detail from the court filing, Waymo says it was tipped off of the alleged theft when Waymo was "apparently inadvertently" copied on an email from a vendor of Uber's. The email included an attachment of an Uber circuit board that "bears a striking resemblance to Waymo's own highly confidential and proprietary design and reflects Waymo trade secrets," Waymo said in its lawsuit. In addition to the allegations against Levandowski, Waymo's complaint claims a supply-chain manager and a hardware engineer stole additional trade secrets before leaving their jobs at Waymo to join Otto, which was later acquired by Uber. The technology at stake involves a laser-based sensing system known as LiDAR, which helps self-driving cars position themselves on the roads, figure out where they're going, and essentially see what's around them. Indeed, Waymo's leadership in the self-driving car arena has much to do with its LiDAR system. They're "so far ahead of everyone else because the maps they use are so detailed and the LiDAR they're using gives so much rich information," John Leonard, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me in 2015.