Waymo, Alphabet Inc.’s self-driving car division, has requested a federal judge to postpone it's October 11 court date for the trial against Uber. The Alphabet-owned self-driving car company notes in its request that it has acquired new evidence regarding the trial and needs additional time to go through reams of pages of documents before making any more claims, or presenting the documents in court. However, According to Gizmodo, Waymo may also use this time to reach an external agreement with Uber.
Waymo and Uber lock horns over self-driving car secrets
Earlier in September, Waymo scored a major victory over Uber, as a federal appeals court ordered the ride-hailing company to give up some secret documents directly related to the ongoing trial between the two companies. Waymo claims that Anthony Levandowski, a former engineer at Google, stole the company’s technology regarding autonomous cars, before leaving the company and establishing his own autonomous trucking firm called Otto. Subsequently, Uber acquired Otto, which is why Waymo is now accusing Uber of building autonomous cars based stolen and copyrighted technology.
The secret documentation that Uber has been ordered to handover are due diligence reports from Stroz Friedberg, a forensics and cybersecurity firm.
Uber hired Friedberg to vet Levandowski-owned Otto before acquiring the firm. Now that Waymo has gotten hands on these documents, the firm has requested that the trial be delayed beyond the October 11 date.
What do the reports contain?
The comprehensive due diligence reports compiled by the investigators of Stroz Friedberg includes information that they were able to obtain from Levandowski’s mobiles and computers.
The documents were so closely guarded that the Uber board members were allowed only to see the summary. Waymo claims that it will need additional time to go through the reports.
Waymo lawyers have also accused Stroz Friedberg and Uber of handing over a small portion of the requested documents. Waymo's lawyers informed the judge presiding over the lawsuit trial that the company needed more time as they had not received all communication and documents from Uber following the September 13 court decision.
The lawyers stated that it would be unfair to Waymo if the court proceedings are not rescheduled from October to a later date, given that there is a whole lot more evidence for the lawyers to go through. Whatever the reason might be, a delayed trial date would buy both companies some more time to settle the case among themselves.
