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There have been new developments in the world's largest driverless car project between Waymo, an autonomous driving company under Google's parent company, and Uber.
According to the latest news from Reuters, the arbitrator finalized the verdict against Uber business chief Lior Ron and former employee Anthony Levandowski last week, increasing the technical fine to US$128 million, not including undisclosed legal fees and interest.
In other words, this means that Uber and Lewandowski's struggle has failed again, and all of Uber's efforts have gone to waste. Not only that, Uber is very likely to have to share the bitter fruit of failure with his two employees and pay a fine of approximately RMB 880 million.
As the dust is about to settle, let’s take a final look back at this incident that has affected the world’s two largest autonomous driving giants.
Rising Stars
When talking about the origin of the story, we have to mention a person first. He is a genius, a former Google engineer, a serial entrepreneur, an enthusiastic autonomous driving developer, and the core figure in the Waymo v. Uber commercial theft case - Anthony Lewandowski.
Originally just a member of the think tank on driverless technology and confined to academic research for many years, Lewandowski had an opportunity to change his career in 2004, and has since embarked on the "roller coaster" of life.
One day in 2002, when his mother called him and talked about the competition organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Lewandowski was extremely excited because he had already determined that he would devote his life to the research of driverless cars.
On March 13, 2004, the "Grand Challenge" sponsored by DARPA started. The race covered a total of 228.5 kilometers and its purpose was to encourage the development of driverless technology.
At that time, all 15 participating teams brought their driverless vehicles to the desert outside Barstow, California. Lewandowski's "Blue Team" was very conspicuous among them because they were the only team that brought a two-wheeled driverless motorcycle to the competition. This motorcycle was the famous "Ghostrider". Relying on precise GPS signals and stereo cameras, it achieved strong balance and navigation capabilities. It was later collected in the Smithsonian National Museum of History in the United States.
Although the "Ghost Rider" was eliminated after the semi-finals, this did not affect the value of the car or Lewandowski's determination to devote himself to autonomous driving.
His friend commented on him at the time, "He is the most energetic, sharp-eyed and determined person I have ever met."
If 2004 changed the second half of Lewandowski's career, then late 2010 was the beginning of his rise to the top.
In 2007, Lewandowski joined Google as a VueTool project and became one of the main architects of the Google Street View project. After working at Google for a few weeks, he co-founded 510 Systems with his college friends Andrew Schultz and Pierre-Yves Droz, and was acquired by Google in late 2010 and became a key part of Google X.
In a short time, Google's autonomous driving was on the right track, and 510 Systems replaced its Prius with a new Lexus SUV...
Changing Times
After 510 Systems joined Google, Lewandowski gradually became the backbone of Google's autonomous driving project. 510 Systems also brought a milestone achievement to Google - it developed more than 5 autonomous vehicles.
Anthony's Robots, founded by Lewandowski, built a self-driving Toyota Prius called "Pribot", which was described by The Guardian as the first self-driving car to use lidar to measure distance and drive on public roads.
During his time at Google, Lewandowski continued to act in his "sharp-eyed, energetic, low-key" style. After 510 Systems was consolidated, he also quietly founded a lidar company, Odin Wave, which was later renamed Tyto LiDAR. But this later became an important inducement for Lewandowski to leave Google.
In early 2015, Lewandowski repeatedly proposed to Google executives to acquire Tyto LiDAR, but Google executives' refusal to buy the deal dealt a deep blow to his sense of technological identity.
After that, the commercialization speed of Google's self-driving technology gradually slowed down. In the summer of the same year, Lewandowski began to meet frequently with Uber executives who were new to the field of self-driving. This led to the subsequent "rebellion" incident.
In January 2016, after working at Google for nearly nine years, Lewandowski left Google with former Google colleague Leo Rowan and co-founded Ottomotto (later changed to Otto) with Don Burnette and Claire Delaunay, and acquired the controversial Tyto LidAR.
Less than three months after its establishment, the company was acquired by Uber for a huge sum of US$680 million in August. Lewandowski then became the head of the driverless car research project of Waymo's "arch-rival".
Job-hopping is common in Silicon Valley. In California, where there is no prohibition on competition, job-hopping is not a crime. However, if one also steals trade secrets and then job-hops to an "enemy" company, he or she will be severely punished.
What caught Waymo's attention was a LiDAR cooperation email. In December 2016, Waymo employees accidentally found a drawing of an Otto circuit board in this email, and the design was very similar to Waymo's current LiDAR. In addition, Google discovered that other former Waymo employees who later switched to Otto and Uber had downloaded other highly confidential information related to Google's LiDAR technology, including supplier lists, manufacturing details, and highly technical work descriptions.
More importantly, Waymo discovered that before Lewandowski left, he downloaded 14,000 highly confidential Waymo files, about 10G in size, most of which were related to lidar technology, including Waymo's proprietary circuit board design.
Using these "stolen" files, Uber developed autonomous driving and plans to launch a driverless air taxi similar to Google's Tiramisu - Uber Elevate.
So in February 2017, an enraged Waymo formally filed a lawsuit in court, officially bringing Lewandowski and Uber to court. The focus of the lawsuit was the patent issue of lidar technology.
This lawsuit, which can be regarded as the world's first autonomous driving case, lasted for a full year. In the end, Uber agreed not to include Waymo's confidential information in its hardware and software and agreed to pay compensation. The two parties reached a settlement agreement, and Uber transferred 0.34%, or about 244.8 million US dollars, of its equity to Waymo.
Of course, the final reconciliation between the two companies was limited to the two companies. For Lewandowski, the storm is far from over.
A new emperor chooses his own ministers
As a result of the lawsuit, Lewandowski was fired by Uber on May 26, 2017.
Subsequently, Lewandowski founded another new autonomous driving company in 2018 - Kache.ai, which was later renamed Pronto.ai. This is a company that develops autonomous highway semi-truck modification systems based on camera principles.
But commercial theft continues.
Last August, Lewandowski was charged by federal prosecutors with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of Google's business secrets. The former self-driving genius was dishevelled, with a foot monitor, and was eventually able to avoid jail after his parents paid $300,000 in bail and mortgaged their property.
In fact, in March before this, Levandowski lost the lawsuit and was sentenced to pay $127 million in compensation, and he and Ron had to jointly bear an additional $1 million in compensation. However, due to the reluctance of Uber and Levandowski, a new sentence was issued recently, increasing the fine to $128 million.
In this case, the biggest winner is undoubtedly Waymo, and the biggest loser, besides Lewandowski, is Uber, which should be crying more sadly.
In court, Levandowski disclosed a net worth of about $72 million, which is certainly not enough to pay off the $128 million fine, and Uber has said it had to pay the entire judgment as part of a settlement with two former employees.
By this calculation, the total compensation that Uber may have to pay in this battle over the driverless car case is as high as 370 million US dollars, or about 2.58 billion yuan.
In addition to the confirmed fine amount, it also does not include the high lawyer-related fees of both parties, the loss of brand reputation, and the departures of Lewandowski, Ron and founder and CEO Kalanick.
After the incident, Kalanick, who was "troubled both internally and externally", was found by Uber's major shareholder Benchmark to have deliberately concealed a lot of known information. Kalanick had suggested that Lewandowski create a company for Uber to acquire. Subsequent evidence showed that Kalanick not only learned about the report commissioned by Uber's legal advisor Stroz Friedberg on whether Otto or Lewandowski had any documents or information belonging to Waymo, but also unilaterally decided not to disclose the content of the report to the board of directors.
Later, more unfavorable details were disclosed. On March 11, 2016, Lewandowski reported to Kalanick and others that he had five CDs containing information about Google. The concealment of these news also pushed Kalanick to the edge of the cliff step by step.
Now that the dust has settled, the three parties have settled their fate. The world's first autonomous driving case has come to an end, but what impact will it have on the future development of the autonomous driving field?
Waymo is still the big brother in the field of autonomous driving. Uber has lowered its profile and continued to move forward. Lewandowski has to start over again. Is everything back to square one? Everything starts over again?
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