The War For The World's Self Driving Future Has Started — Heavyweights Set For Slugfest

Waymo has filed a 28-page complaint in the California Federal court accusing ride-sharing company Uber's self-driving division boss Anthony Levandowski (earlier the head of Waymo)
of stealing "highly confidential and proprietary files shortly before his resignation" from the Google-owned firm.

According to the complaint filed by Waymo, Levandowski downloaded 9.7 GB of data before leaving Google's autonomous car division and founding Otto, the self-driving truck company in May 2016, which was accquired by Uber soon after for $680 million..

Waymo claims that the plans included a design of it's LiDAR circuit board, which is key to making the system that helps autonomous cars see work properly.

Google's self driving division claims they only got to know about the theft after it one of its employees was accidentally CC'd on an email from one of its LiDAR-component suppliers, that had the subject line: OTTO FILES.

The email lead to Waymo investigating Uber's acqiuisition of Otto which revealed that just weeks after the purchase occured, Uber suddenly in possesion of an ‘in-house custom built' LiDAR system and was no longer third party systems.

Most Viewed Car Photo Gallery

While Uber and Google slug it out, another company, one that actually makes semi-autonomous cars already has two cars on the road that can drive themselves. Click on the photo gallery below to view the latest images of the Tesla Model X.