The rear window of a Waymo driverless car during a Google event on Dec. 13, 2016, in San Francisco.... [+]
Google’s self-driving car project that began in 2009 is well known as the incubator that kickstarted a multi-billion dollar race to perfect this 21st automotive technology. Along the way, it also helped Google amass hundreds, perhaps thousands, of patents covering every aspect of software, hardware and on-road behavior for automated vehicles.
The blistering lawsuit filed against Uber and its Otto driverless truck unit by Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo alleging trade secret theft, based on alleged actions by a former Google engineer now at Uber, also makes clear that the company intends to aggressively protect that patent trove and big head start.
Automated vehicle tech will be a game changer, creating the possibility of huge reductions in traffic deaths, ubiquitous low-cost urban transportation and potential relief for drivers from the soul-crushing tedium of congested highways. Like any transformative technology, scores of companies smell revenue opportunities and are jumping into the space quickly. Given how much Google has poured into mastering automated driving, and what’s at stake for Waymo as it works to sell complete ready-to-install driverless systems to FCA, Honda and other companies, the Uber suit looks like the opening salvo of many legal battles to protect its intellectual property.
“I’ve been warning that we could eventually see automated driving patent wars that rival the smartphone patent wars from several years ago,” Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina and research scholar at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, told Forbes. “Everybody is going to be infringing everybody’s patents eventually.”
The lawsuit by Waymo, created in December, claims Anthony Levandowski, a founding member of Google’s car team, downloaded 14,000 proprietary design files and transferred them to an external drive six weeks before he resigned. In early 2016, Levandowski started San Francisco-based Otto with a focus on creating software and hardware kits for commercial trucks to drive themselves. Uber bought Otto in August 2016 for an estimated $680 million. Last year, a Waymo supplier accidently included it on an Uber email detailing a laser LiDAR sensor resembling Waymo’s patented LiDAR design, triggering a review that resulted in the suit.
Uber on Feb. 24 dismissed Waymo's allegations, calling them a "baseless attempt to slow down a competitor."
Google has "a fantastic IP team and doesn’t bring a lot of loser lawsuits," Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, a Stanford Law School professor who specializes in intellectual property law, told Forbes. "I think Google is in a strong IP position here. I also don’t know what its strategy is – a broader war on Uber or lucrative licensing deals out of everyone else in the autonomous car space."
Google has never revealed how much it's invested to master self-driving cars, but given strong support for the program from company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, funding has been considerable. In the lawsuit, Waymo said only, “with a goal of bringing self-driving cars to the mass market, Waymo has invested tens of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours of engineering time to custom-build the most advanced and cost-effective LiDAR sensors in the industry.”
That reference applies only to its R&D for laser LiDAR, a key part of the vision system that provides high-definition, 3-D images of a vehicle’s surroundings. How much more Google poured into creating its own cameras and complementary sensors, into the massive onboard computing system that processes visual and mapping information and all the programming that underpins artificial intelligence capable of driving a vehicle safely on public roads remains a mystery.
A cursory review by Forbes shows that Google has been granted 260 U.S. patents that specifically refer to autonomous vehicles (including some for aerial drones) and 176 patents that reference designs and usage for LiDAR. Given many years of work by Google Maps and Alphabet's machine learning and robotics teams at its X skunkworks facility, presumably its intellectual property goes far beyond patents that clearly relate to self-driving cars. A Waymo spokesman declined to provide a tally.
The technical maturity of Google's program was borne out in "disengagement" data Waymo filed with California's Department of Motor Vehicles for 2016, which tracks how frequently a human driver in a test vehicle takes over control from the automated system. Out of 635,868 autonomous test miles driven in California, it reported just 124 disengagements for the year. On a per-thousand mile basis, the system disengaged just 0.2 times, a rate exponentially better than reported by any other company.
"Right now, what those DMV figures tell you is they are in a class by themselves," Alex Lidow, CEO of EPC, a Los Angeles-based supplier of chips for LiDAR units, told Forbes.
Waymo's suit seeks a jury trial and an injunction to stop Uber and Otto from using its trade secrets, as well as unspecified damages and legal fees. The fact that Google has created an autonomous vehicle patent bulwark gives Waymo a specific advantage in IP litigation, said Walker Smith. "If there is intentional patent infringement, punitive damages can give be triple for punitive sake."
Not all its patents will be equally impervious to challenges. "What we’ve seen in the automated driving world is patents getting filed for silly things, for trivial things, for essential things that everybody needs to do," he said. "Google has patented driving slightly to the left side of a lane when you’re passing a truck. Everybody does that and every automated vehicle is going to do that. But that’s their patent."
Beyond Uber, challengers to Waymo and its Google IP are mushrooming. Competition ranges from in-house programs at automakers Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagen and Volvo, to GM's $581 million acquisition of Cruise Automation, Tesla's rapidly evolving Autopilot system and Ford's $1 billion backing of Argo AI, a Pittsburgh startup led by another former Google self-driving car engineer. Argo is tasked with creating the software for an automated Ford rideshare vehicle due in 2021. Add to that stealth startups Zoox, Nuro.ai, led by two former Google engineers, Drive.ai and Aurora, the brainchild of former Google Self-Driving Car chief Chris Urmson and Sterling Anderson, who previously led Tesla's automated driving team.
Tesla in January filed a lawsuit against Anderson and Urmson claiming the two worked together to poach Tesla engineers for their new venture.
Waymo and its rivals all want a shot at creating commercially viable automated cars.
"Google has been doing a lot of research for which it hasn’t been able to get a return for a while," Ouellette said. "Now that there’s finally going to be a market, it’s going to be looking for that return."
