UPDATE: Google Stole from Tesla and Uber Stole from Google

Are you just as confused as I am…

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Alphabet’s Waymo has accused Uber of stealing trade secrets.

Alphabet’s self-driving car unit Waymo is suing Uber, alleging theft of trade secrets, patent infringement of its sensor technology and unfair competition.

The legal move is an unusual one for Alphabet, which is an investor in Uber and rarely initiates lawsuits, and reflects the steep costs and high stakes in self-driving technology.

Uber’s autonomous driving team was built around its $680m acquisition last year of Otto. The six-month-old start-up was founded by Anthony Levandowski, a former engineer at what was then Google’s self-driving car team, who now leads Uber’s efforts in autonomous vehicles.

Waymo accuses Mr Levandowski and two other former employees of stealing thousands of files, including designs of its autonomous driving hardware, before they left the company, alleging that they intended to replicate the technology elsewhere.

Waymo is seeking an injunction against Uber to prevent it using the technology, and unspecified damages. It is unclear whether the technology in question is currently in use in Uber’s self-driving car prototypes, which are on the roads in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Tempe, Arizona, or Otto’s fleet of autonomous trucks.

In December, Google’s eight-year-old self-driving team spun out of its X lab to become its own standalone division, renamed Waymo, within Alphabet.

Waymo said it had invested thousands of hours and millions of dollars in its own laser sensor system, known as Lidar, which its autonomous cars use to “see” the world around them as they drive along streets. The sensors, which allow vehicles to detect and avoid obstacles and pedestrians, are vital to the functioning of many self-driving car systems, including Uber’s. Waymo compared its rival’s alleged theft of the technology to “stealing a secret recipe from a beverage company”.

“Our parent company Alphabet has long worked with Uber in many areas, and we didn’t make this decision lightly,” Waymo said in a blog post. “However, given the overwhelming facts that our technology has been stolen, we have no choice but to defend our investment and development of this unique technology.”

Uber and Mr Levandowski did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Waymo lawsuit is not the first time Uber has run into legal trouble with its self-driving cars. Late last year, its Volvo prototypes were forced off the road in San Francisco after it failed to obtain permits which the California Department of Motor Vehicles deemed necessary for testing autonomous cars.