Uber announced this week that the head of their self-driving division, Anthony Levandowski, has been fired.
Since February, Levandowski has been at the center of a lawsuit brought against Uber. Levandowski used to work for Google’s self-driving car company, Waymo. Waymo claims that before he left, Levandowski illegally downloaded more than 14,000 files relating to their self-driving tech.
After leaving Waymo, Levandowski started Otto, company focused on providing kits that could turn commercial trucks into autonomous-capable vehicles. By purchasing Otto for $700 million, Uber also gained access to the technology that was allegedly built using stolen data from Waymo.
Uber has denied the accusations against them, and has claimed that its self-driving technology was built independently from any Google files that may or may not have been stolen. Uber appeared to cooperate with investigators, urging Levandowski to testify and share evidence after a federal judge ordered that he do so.
Instead, Levandowski did something unexpected: He invoked his 5th amendment right to avoid incriminating himself. This is unusual because Levandowski is actually not the subject of the lawsuit; Uber is. According to Wired, this could be a sign that Levandowski and his legal team believe that he might be vulnerable to criminal charges.
Apparently, the judge presiding over the lawsuit thinks criminal charges might not be so unlikely – he’s taken the incredibly rare step of referring the case to the U.S. Attorney’s office. This would allow criminal charges to be filed against Levandowski by the government. If charged and convicted, he could be in jail for 15 years or more according to Forbes.
Uber claims to have fired Levandowski after he failed to hand over the files requested by the judge. They also decided to quietly retire the “Otto” brand name, which may have been an attempt to further separate their brand and technology from anything that might be seen as tainted by Levandowski’s alleged theft. It may also have been a result of a trademark infringement lawsuit brought against Uber by Otto Motors, a Canadian automated vehicle company.
Despite losing their star engineer and more than a dozen top executives in the past year, getting knocked around by high-profile scandals, and defending itself legally against the tech behemoth that is Google, Uber is pushing full steam ahead.
Source: truckinginfo, fleetowner, nytimes, techcrunch, arstechnica, wired, truckinginfo, forbes
Will says
Hmm, it’s a attempt by Google to hamstring uber. Funny since they art using the tech on a small scale yet, lawsuits will keep this tied up for a while.