its subsidiary self-driving trucking company, Otto, with allegations of stealing trade secrets and infringing on patents. The company claimed that three ex-Google employees, including Anthony Levandowski, had stolen trade secrets, including thousands of driverless car technology files, from Google before joining Uber. The infringement is related to Waymo's proprietary lidar technology, which could measure the distances between objects using laser and create their three-dimensional representations. Google accused Uber of colluding with Levandowski to obtain information about its lidar and other technologies in its driverless car project. The former Google engineer downloaded 9 gigabytes of data that included over a hundred trade secrets; eight were at stake during the trial. The trial began on February 5, 2018, and concluded on February 9, as a settlement was announced with Uber giving Waymo 0.34 percent of Uber's stock, the equivalent of $245 million in Uber equity and agreeing to ensure Uber does not infringe Waymo's intellectual property. Part of the agreement included a guarantee that "Waymo confidential information is not being incorporated in Uber Advanced Technologies Group hardware and software." In released statements after the settlement, Uber maintained that it received no trade secrets. In May, according to the statement from Matt Kallman, an Uber spokesman, Uber had fired Levandowski, which resulted in a loss of roughly $250 million of his own equity in Uber and this value almost exactly equaled to the stock value Uber paid to Waymo LLC. Uber announced that it was halting production of self-driving through trucks through Otto in July 2018, and the subsidiary company was shuttered. California DMV safety disclosure dispute In January 2022, Waymo sued the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to prevent data on driverless crashes from being made public. Waymo maintained that such information constituted a trade secret. According to The Los Angeles Times, the "topics Waymo wants to keep hidden include how it plans to handle driverless car emergencies, what it would do if a robot taxi started driving itself where it wasn’t supposed to go, and what constraints there are on the car’s ability to traverse San Francisco’s tunnels, tight curves and steep hills." In February 2022, Waymo was successful in preventing the release of certain robotaxi safety records to the public. Following the conclusion of the case, a spokesperson for Waymo affirmed that the company will be transparent with the public about its safety record. References Further reading External links