The main partner of Waymo company , which inherited the development of Google in the field of automotive "autopilot", it is considered to concern Fiat Chrysler. Meanwhile, according to Reuters , this week Waymo and Lyft announced the beginning of cooperation in the development of robotic taxis. Prior to this, the main partner of Lyft in this area was General Motors, which is also the investor of the first of the companies. The agreement with Lyft does not restrict cooperation with General Motors.
Lyft is the second largest aggregator of taxi services in the US after the Uber. Waymo has a claim to Uber regarding the misuse of its own developments related to the use of so-called "lidars". Waymo believes that the former company engineer Anthony Levanowski, who later founded the Otto startup, bought by Uber, could use confidential files copied from the corporate Waymo network to develop an "autopilot" ordered by Uber. The trial so far ended with the judge demanding that Lewandowski return all copied Waymo files before May 31, as well as not participate in the development of Uber, somehow related to the use of "lidars."
Interestingly, the judge did not recognize some of the inventions described by Waymo as information constituting a commercial secret. The fact of copying about 14 000 files from Waymo computers left the company engineer by the court was proved. Lewandowski himself refused to testify against himself, citing the existence of such an opportunity under American law.