Uber vs Waymo: What Fans Should Know About the Heated Self-Driving Car Battle

Waymo has accused Uber of stealing a design and fans around the globe are eager to know what's next for the two tech giant's battle. On Thursday, a federal judge has decided to allow an expert to intervene.

According to The Mercury News, the federal judge gave permission to a Waymo-chosen expert to check on Uber's technology. This is to find evidence that Uber really took out some designs from Google's self-driving car project.

Waymo is blaming its former engineer Anthony Levandowski for the alleged stolen information. Levandowski has left Google and the self-driving car project team believes the engineer took confidential information with him when he established Otto.

For starters, Uber has acquired Otto although it is unclear if Levandowski really did provide information that's supposed to be owned by Waymo to its new business partner. In the lawsuit, the filing party accused Levandowski of downloading the data of Waymo for his personal use.

According to Tech Crunch, Google has further accused Levandowski of meeting up with some Uber executives in January 2016. The problem about this is, at that time, Levandowski was still under the employment contract of Waymo. The engineer has also allegedly given an immediate resignation without earlier notice. It is worth noting that he spent almost a decade working with Google.

Come April 2016, Anthony Levandowski signed a confidentiality agreement with Uber. It turns out that two other Waymo employees may have done the same downloading stint that Levandowski did. Radu Raduta and Sameer Kshirsagar allegedly downloaded some files before moving on with Otto, which is now acquired by Uber.

Uber has yet to officially release its statement against Waymo. For now, fans will have to wait and see if the allegations of Google are true. The most interesting part of the battle is the fact that Anthony Levandowski has asserted his right to the Fifth Amendment.