Uber denies any wrongdoing in stolen LiDAR technology lawsuit.
We reported on the 24th of Feburary that Otto, the self-driving truck company owned by Uber, is being sued by another self-driving company, Waymo. The lawsuit, which is aimed both at Otto and Uber, concerns stolen LiDAR technology which was discovered in an accidentally cc’d email to Waymo from one of their parts manufacturers. Waymo claims that Otto’s co-founder, who used to be a Google employee working for it’s self-driving division prior to it being named Waymo, left the company with thousands of stolen documents.
Waymo claims that the former employee, Anthony Levandowski, took some 14,000 classified documents with him. Among them were supposedly schematics for a circuit board and details about Waymo’s radar and LiDAR technology. Waymo says that Otto’s LiDAR system is suspiciously similar to their own.
Now Uber is responding to the lawsuit, denying any wrongdoing. In a statement made to Business Insider, Uber called the lawsuit a baseless attempt to slow down Waymo’s competition: “We are incredibly proud of the progress that our team has made. We have reviewed Waymo’s claims and determined them to be a baseless attempt to slow down a competitor and we look forward to vigorously defending against them in court. In the meantime, we will continue our hard work to bring self-driving benefits to the world.” The denial is perhaps to be expected and means we will likely be seeing a drawn out court-battle take place over several months or more.
It’s interesting to note that Google Ventures, a sister company to Waymo, has a long standing investment with Uber.
source: Business Insider
