Thinking about the fantastic pie-in-the-sky future is always a fun exercise. I, too, want a self-driving car. But some weeks, it's clear everyone needs to come down to earth. This was one of them. Tesla sued two other electric vehicle companies focusing on self-driving for trade secret theft, proving that building this tech will be a grind.

On Wednesday night, Tesla sued four former employees and the self-driving startup Zoox for misappropriation of trade secrets. No, you're not having driverless-car lawsuit déjà vu--you're just remembering the time last year when Waymo and Uber settled their own trade secrets case after four days of trial. Tesla's suit, filed in the Northern California federal district court, alleges that four of its former employees took proprietary information related to "warehousing, logistics, and inventory control operations" when they left the electric automaker, and later, while working for Zoox, used that proprietary information to improve its technology and operations. Tesla says the former employees--Scott Turner, Sydney Cooper, Chrisian Dement, and Craig Emigh--worked in product distribution and warehouse supervising. It alleges they forwarded the trade secrets to their own personal email accounts, or the accounts of other former Tesla employees.