Uber autonomous truck division is dead, long live its self-driving cars

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The big news in road freight today is that Uber has cancelled the development of autonomous trucks. The company spin is that it wants to concentrate on the development of its self-driving car technology, but according to this in-depth report in TechCrunch, its is the enormous lawsuit it is facing from Google over alleged theft of autonomous truck designs, following Uber’s $680m purchase of Otto. “Nine months after the acquisition, Uber was embroiled in a trade secrets lawsuit with Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet. Waymo accused Levandowski of hatching a plan to use trade secrets related to Waymo’s in-house development of LiDAR tech and use it to kickstart Otto and ultimately, Uber’s own self-driving technology programme.”