The company that began as Google’s driverless car project has reached a deal to collaborate with ride-hailing app Lyft on tests of self-driving vehicles.
USA Today reports the deal intensifies the bitter rivalry between Waymo, a division of Google parent Alphabet, and ride-hailing market leader Uber.
It also gives Lyft a powerful new ally in the self-driving car race against its more well-funded adversary Uber. And it places Waymo a step closer to becoming a business with real-world customers.
Today’s news landed at the same time that a judge’s ruling in the case Waymo v. Uber was unsealed, revealing that the court did not grant a potentially damaging injunction against Uber that would have compelled it to stop using any sensor technology that could have been created with Waymo trade secrets.
But the judge did officially order former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski—who started the self-driving truck company Otto in early 2016 that Uber bought for $670 million last summer—to stop working on any Uber projects related to LiDAR, or light detection and ranging sensors.
Waymo’s suit charges that Levandowski not only stole 14,000 files of trade secrets before leaving Google in January 2016, but that those files helped Uber improve its LiDAR technology. Uber has countered that the suit is just an attempt to stall a competitor in the potentially lucrative race for autonomous car tech.
