The competition in the still young market of self-propelled cars is becoming tougher. Now, Alphabet-daughter Waymo raises serious accusations against the US service agent Uber. Last Thursday, Google's sister in California filed lawsuit against theft of his sensor technology. The data claw is so serious that Waymo is accused of the "calculated" theft of business secrets, patent infringements and unfair competition.
Leading sensor technology from Google
Google has been working on the technology for its autonomous driving car for years, and is currently taking the lead with its Lidar sensors technology. A few months ago, the parent company Alphabet distributed the project to the newly founded company Waymo. He also worked diligently on self-propelled cars and has reportedly made great progress in the recent past. But according to Waymo, the development of Uber is based on stolen documents.
Targeted data gag
According to him, the former top developer of the Google project Anthony Levandowski had over 14,000 files before the company left the beginning of 2016. Shortly afterwards he founded the start-up Otto, whose technology for self-propelled trucks has since then been very similar to that of Waymo. A few months later, Uber Levandovsky took over the company, other former Waymo employees changed sides. It is still a civil lawsuit. But according to Wired , the dispute could escalate and lead to criminal proceedings. The accusations raised by Waymo are unusually detailed. Levandowski is to copy the nearly 9.7 gigabytes of confidential data from Waymos servers and then tried to blur its tracks. On medium Waymo has written a detailed explanation of its action in a blog entry.