Oleg Zabluda's blog
Friday, January 27, 2017
 
Tesla Sues Former Autopilot Director for Improper Recruiting
Tesla Sues Former Autopilot Director for Improper Recruiting
Suit names Sterling Anderson and Chris Urmson, former CTO of Google’s self-driving car effort
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By "TIM HIGGINS" Jan. 26, 2017 4:39 p.m. ET

Tesla Motors Inc. is accusing the former director of its Autopilot program and the former tech guru behind Google’s self-driving car of improperly recruiting the auto maker’s engineers to create their own autonomous-car startup.

The allegations raised in a lawsuit filed Thursday in California state court in Santa Clara are sure to rock the nascent self-driving car industry that is racing to put automated vehicles on the roadways in the next few years.

Tesla’s lawsuit accuses Sterling Anderson of violating his employment contract with the company by trying to recruit at least a dozen engineers and taking “hundreds of gigabytes” of confidential and proprietary information for the benefit of a company he allegedly founded while still at Tesla. Mr. Anderson oversaw the team developing the semiautonomous Autopilot system from November 2015 until this month.

The auto maker also accuses Mr. Anderson’s business partner, Chris Urmson, of helping to recruit Tesla workers for their new startup called Aurora. Mr. Urmson is the former chief technology officer of Alphabet Inc.’s Google self-driving effort, now called Waymo.

“Tesla cannot sit idly by when an employee like Anderson abuses his position of trust and orchestrates a scheme to deliberately and repeatedly violate his non-solicit agreement, hide evidence, and take the company’s confidential and proprietary information for use in a competing venture,” Tesla said in the lawsuit.

When reached for comment, Mr. Anderson emailed a statement attributed to his company, Aurora Innovation LLC, which was also named as a defendant in the suit. “Tesla’s meritless lawsuit reveals both a startling paranoia and an unhealthy fear of competition,” the statement said. “This abuse of the legal system is a malicious attempt to stifle a competitor and destroy personal reputations. Aurora looks forward to disproving these false allegations in court and to building a successful self-driving business.”

Mr. Urmson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit sheds new light on behind-the-scenes drama at the company’s Autopilot department, which has been under pressure to meet Chief Executive Elon Musk’s ambitious goals. Mr. Musk promises Tesla will demonstrate an Autopilot-enabled vehicle capable of driving itself from Los Angeles to New York by year’s end.

Following a fatal crash last May in Florida involving Autopilot, Tesla has defended itself against public scrutiny that it rushed out the technology. The company said the technology is safe when properly used.

Last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration closed an investigation into the safety of Autopilot after it didn’t find any defect in the design or performance in the system. Autopilot allows some of Tesla’s electric cars to steer, brake, cruise and change lanes themselves under certain circumstances.

Other companies, meanwhile, are rushing to develop their own advanced self-driving capabilities. Tesla noted that General Motors Co. acquired San Francisco startup Cruise Automation in a deal last year valued at $1 billion, while Uber Technologies Inc. paid as much as $680 million to acquire Ottomotto LLC, a self-driving tractor-trailer company co-founded by Anthony Levandowski, who helped spearhead Google’s car program.

“Anderson and his partners sought to launch a startup that could quickly fetch the same quick money as Cruise Automation and Otto—though by violating the law in doing so,” the lawsuit says.

Tesla claims Mr. Anderson and Mr. Urmson first discussed setting up their company last summer. Mr. Urmson left Google in August.

To avoid Mr. Anderson’s contractual prohibition of recruiting Tesla employees, the suit claims he gave a list of potential hires to Mr. Urmson. Tesla alleges Mr. Anderson worked “mostly behind-the-scenes” on recruiting but took a hands-on role with some prospective hires.

“Anderson boasted to at least one Tesla engineer who expressed misgivings about the new venture that the scope of hardware development at Aurora would be ‘more expansive’ than the engineer might expect and, in fact, Aurora had already taken meetings with the heads of what he referred to as ‘four of the top five’” auto makers, the lawsuit says.

In December, Mr. Anderson gave notice that he intended to leave but didn’t inform Tesla that he was starting a competing venture, according to the suit.

At the same time, the auto maker was racing to complete updates for Autopilot software and heading toward the end of the regulators’ investigation. Tesla claims Mr. Anderson agreed to stay with the company through the release of an anticipated Autopilot update to minimize disruption of the team.

On Jan. 3, three of the Tesla engineers recruited by Aurora gave notice that they planned to leave, though one later changed his mind, the suit says.

The next day, according to the suit, Mr. Anderson used a company-issued laptop at Mr. Urmson’s house to work on a document titled “Recruiting targets.”

As his end-date neared, the suit alleges, Mr. Anderson wiped a company-issued iPhone that would have shown text messages and phone calls soliciting Tesla employees.

Tesla says it fired Mr. Anderson that day, on Jan. 4, more than two years after he began at the company. The suit alleges Mr. Anderson returned the company’s laptop but not backups of data he allegedly took from Tesla.

On Jan. 10, Tesla announced it had hired Chris Lattner from Apple Inc. to serve as vice president of Autopilot software. He gained notoriety at Apple for his role in creating Swift, the programming language the tech giant created for apps.
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-sues-sterling-anderson-former-head-of-autopilot-for-improper-recruiting-1485462331

http://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-sues-sterling-anderson-former-head-of-autopilot-for-improper-recruiting-1485462331

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