Waymo

Waymo, the Alphabet business working on autonomous cars, has released its first safety report, a recap of 3.5m miles of on-road activity. Intended to reassure potential passengers - and wary regulators - that self-driving vehicles are "safer by design," the report covers everything from incidents through to backup systems. It also digs into what sort of interactions with a driverless vehicle passengers might expect.

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Waymo just gained itself a pretty big companion in its quest to tackle autonomous vehicles. Today Intel announced that it will be joining Waymo in developing technologies for self-driving cars. Specifically, Intel believes it can provide Waymo with the processing power it needs to create level 4 and level 5 autonomous vehicles.

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Autonomous vehicles have to be equipped to deal with many, many different situations, and some of them involve emergency vehicles. Whether it is a police cruiser trying to pull over the self-driving car or an ambulance needing to drive past, autonomous cars must be able to respond appropriately and safely, a category of knowledge that Waymo has revisited lately. According to a long post recently published by the Waymo Team, June brought new efforts to improve the company's autonomous cars' abilities to detect these emergency vehicles.

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Waymo has dropped all but one of the patent infringement claims it's challenging Uber over in court, as the two companies fight over self-driving car tech. The Alphabet-owned company had accused Uber of infringing on four different patents related to autonomous driving, filing a lawsuit back in February. According to Waymo, its former employee Anthony Levandowski had stolen a cache of technical documents about the company's developments and taken them to set up Otto, a self-driving vehicle startup later acquired by Uber.

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Avis Budget Group has announced a new partnership with Alphabet's Waymo, saying that it will maintain and support the latter company's self-driving car fleet. The maintenance/support offered under this partnership will take place at Avis's various rental locations, enabling Waymo to keep its vehicles maintained and ready for use in many locations. The Alphabet company is creating a 600-vehicle fleet, among other things, for riders to utilize.

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Uber has fired Anthony Levandowski, the controversial vice president of technology who had until recently been leading the ride-sharing firm's autonomous car business. Levandowski was one of Uber's highest-profile talent grabs, joining the company after it acquired his startup, Otto, in July 2016. That prompted a lawsuit from Alphabet's self-driving car company Waymo, accusing the engineer of stealing tech secrets.

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As the ongoing trade secrets lawsuit between Google's Waymo and Uber continues to heat up, the ride-sharing company has threatened to fire one of its top engineers if he doesn't cooperate with court orders. Anthony Levandowski is currently an employee on Uber's self-driving car efforts, but before that he was a technology lead at Waymo, similarly developing autonomous vehicle tech. Now he's at the center of the lawsuit and is being accused of stealing confidential information and taking it with him to Uber.

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Things don't seem to be going Uber's way of late. And we're not just talking about gender-related controversies. San Francisco District Judge William Alsup as issued a ruling that rejected Uber's attempt to take the matter behind closed doors. He has sent the lawsuit to the Department of Justice to investigate whether there was indeed a case of trade secret theft. Unless it catches a break, it will see its self-driving ambitions dashed even before they could take root.

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In a legal battle between Alphabet's Waymo (previously under Google) and Uber is raging in California. Revelations today suggest that Uber may have given a former Waymo engineer Anthony Levandowski $250-million in stock options in exchange for a massive amount of data (9.7GB, according to Waymo outside attorney Charles Verhoeven) essentially stolen from Waymo computers. Of course it's not all that simple - there's another company in between Waymo and Uber, but Google suggests that the company in question was created only to act as a shell to cover Levandowki's tracks.

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Uber's self-driving car lead has been put on the back-burner for LIDAR development, amid accusations from Alphabet's Waymo that he stole secrets about the technology. Anthony Levandowski has been head of the Advanced Technologies group at the ride-sharing firm since his startup Otto was acquired by Uber in July 2016. However, his time there hasn't been straightforward.

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Alphabet CEO Larry Page has released the 2016 Founder's Letter for the company, a glowing "State of the Union" for the umbrella company within which Google and Waymo reside. Published ahead of Alphabet's latest financial results, Page's letter predominantly focuses on the spin-offs of various projects into standalone businesses. That, after all, was the primary intention of the company when it was founded back in 2015.

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If Alphabet managed to pique your interest by launching Waymo and you happen to live in the Phoenix area, good news: beginning today, you can apply to participate in Waymo's early rider program. A trial for Alphabet's self-driving fleet of cars, Waymo doesn't just want to get you from point A to point B once and then call it good. Instead, people who are accepted into this program are invited to use Waymo as much as they need to.

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