Former Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick testified at trial on Tuesday that he believed Uber was lagging in self-driving auto development and came up with a plan to hire a star engineer from rival Waymo to catch up with competitors.
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Uber’s LiDAR technology comes from the minds of its own engineers, and even if they brought some knowledge from other companies there’s nothing wrong with that, Carmody said.
Uber’s ex-Chief Executive Travis Kalanick must subdue his notorious hot-headed demeanor and calmly withstand hostile questioning to appear sympathetic to jurors when he is cross-examined by Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo as early as Tuesday during a trade-secrets trial, legal experts said.
“He made a decision and the decision was to cheat”, Verhoeven said. Uber previously ousted now-former CEO Travis Kalanick from the company and multiple allegations of sexual harassment have plagued the ride-sharing company. Waymo has accused the ride-hailing app of stealing and using trade secrets for technology surrounding the new autonomous auto.
Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was confronted Wednesday in court with old texts that suggested he was willing to go to any length to surpass a Google self-driving auto project.
The case hinges on whether ride-hailing firm Uber used apparent trade secrets to advance its autonomous vehicle program. Uber lawyer Bill Carmody attempted to corner Krafcik into admitting Waymo was very unsettled by Uber’s self-driving vehicle project, and intimated the lawsuit may be a panicky reaction to strong competition.
Uber contends that Waymo’s claims are baseless and that none of the files ever made it to the company.
Uber wound up firing Levandowski last May after he refused to relinquish his constitutional rights against self-incrimination when questioned about whether he stole trade secrets before leaving Google. Waymo said engineer Anthony Levandowski downloaded more than 14,000 confidential files in December 2015 containing designs for autonomous vehicles before he went on to lead Uber’s self-driving auto unit in 2016. At the center of it all is robotics engineer Anthony Levandowski, who worked under Alphabet’s Google and abruptly left the company.
Waymo has estimated damages in the case at about $1.9 billion.
The competitive pressures were so great to develop self-driving cars that Kalanick decided “winning was more important than obeying the law”, Verhoeven told the jury. The report was withheld from Waymo’s attorneys until Uber was ordered to disclose it late previous year.
Waymo does not believe this version, and according to the company, Uber stole trade secrets. “There’s no cheating – there’s not a single piece of Google proprietary information at Uber”, Carmody said. “Like most conspiracy theories, it just doesn’t make sense when you hear the whole story”.
“The only thing that’s not OK is trade secrets”, he said.
That’s what prompted it to seek out Levandowski, who was feeling frustrated at Google.
Kalanick was pressured by investors to step down as CEO a month after Levandowski’s firing, partly because of concerns about Waymo’s lawsuit.
Bit9, which has since been rebranded as “Cb Protection” after a merger with cybersecurity software company Carbon Black, logs when portable storage units like thumb drives are attached and removed from business computers.
Waymo says that Anthony Levandowski, a former engineer, is to blame for this situation. Waymo CEO John Krafcik, his company’s first witness, testified that Levandowski’s abrupt departure considerably shifted his perspective.
For instance, if and when Levandowski’s team outfitted a auto with a prototype of a long-range laser-based radars, called lidar, that had a visual range of 250 meters, the team would be able to get 6 percent of the approximately $590 million sale price, according to a document produced during Kalanick’s testimony.
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Google forensic investigator Gary Brown also took the stand on Tuesday.
