GOOG Alphabet Inc

By Tim Higgins and Jack Nicas 

Waymo LLC, the self-driving car unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc., asked a federal court on Friday to halt Uber Technologies Inc.'s efforts to develop autonomous vehicles allegedly based on stolen design secrets.

The request was made to the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, following a suit filed last month accusing Anthony Levandowski, a former key manager in the Google self-driving car project, of taking 14,000 files before quitting last year to create a self-driving truck maker. That startup, called Otto, was quickly acquired by Uber last year.

In a statement, an Uber spokeswoman said: "We are incredibly proud of the progress that our team has made. We have reviewed Waymo's claims and determined them to be a baseless attempt to slow down a competitor and we look forward to vigorously defending against them in court. In the meantime, we will continue our hard work to bring self-driving benefits to the world."

Uber said Mr. Levandowski was not available for an interview.

The new court filings include a statement from Pierre-Yves Droz, a longtime associate of Mr. Levandowski, who has been the technical lead on Waymo's laser-sensor project since the beginning.

The two men had previously founded a company eventually called 510 Systems LLC in 2006 to work on developing laser sensors. Google acquired the company in 2011 and Mr. Droz continued his work as a Google employee.

During a walk around Google's office in January 2016, Mr. Droz says Mr. Levandowski told him about his desire for his new startup to have a long-range lidar -- a radarlike device that uses lasers to give a computer a three-dimensional view of the world. Mr. Levandowksi "told me that he planned to 'replicate' this Waymo technology at his new company, " Mr. Droz said in the filing.

Mr. Droz said Mr. Levandowski previously told him that Mr. Levandowski had met with an Uber executive in 2015 and that "Uber would be interested in buying the team responsible for the lidar we were developing at Google."

Waymo also filed an expert-witness statement to the court from a laser-optics physicist who said he believes Uber's laser-sensor technology uses Waymo's trade secrets and infringes on its patents. Waymo also added a fourth patent to its infringement claims in an amended suit on Friday.

Uber has been testing autonomous vehicles in Pittsburgh since September and briefly had them on San Francisco streets late last year before California regulators revoked the cars' registrations over Uber's failure to obtain a permit for them. It has since begun a test in Tempe, Ariz., and this week obtained the necessary permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to put two self-driving autos on public roads in the state.

Tech companies and auto makers are investing billions of dollars in developing autonomous vehicles, believing they will enable more efficient driving and significantly curtail accidents due to human error. But the technology is years from being fully autonomous and will have to satisfy safety regulations, as well as the public's appetite for being a passenger for a computer.

Waymo has logged more miles -- over 2.5 million -- testing self-driving cars on U.S. roadways than any other company.

--Greg Bensinger contributed to this article.

Write to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com and Jack Nicas at jack.nicas@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 10, 2017 16:48 ET (21:48 GMT)

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