How Anthony Levandowski Put Himself at the Center of an Industry

If federal prosecutors successfully prosecute Anthony Levandowski for 33 federal charges of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets, the self-driving engineer could face millions in fines and decades in prison. The accusations aren’t new—they rehash the core of Waymo’s civil case against Uber, which settled in February 2018—but their resurfacing in this format threatens to put a dismal end to a career remarkable for its range and variation.

For nearly 20 years, the French-American Levandowski has played a kind of purposeful Forrest Gump for the world of autonomous driving. Rather than stumbling into the center of one momentous event after another, Levandowski has put himself there. And he has left a mixed trail in his wake: Former colleagues have described him as brilliant, engaging, motivating, fast-charging, inconsiderate, a weasel, and just plain evil.

None, though, deny that whether for good or ill, the benefit of society or himself, Levandowski has played a propulsive role in the development of self-driving tech. So while his future is up in the air, let’s take a look back at where he’s been.

The Kid With the Motorcycle

After spending his childhood in Belgium (where his mother worked for the European Union), Levandowski moved to the US at 14 to live with his father and attend high school in Marin County, north of San Francisco. He dabbled in robotics while studying industrial engineering at UC Berkeley and made the move into autonomous vehicles when he entered the 2004 Darpa Grand Challenge—a seminal event that helped launch the self-driving industry we know today.

For the 142-mile race from Barstow, California, to Primm, Nevada, Levandowski ran what he called the Blue Team, staffed by his classmates. Working out of his house in Berkeley, they created Ghostrider, a motorcycle that balanced and drove itself. Levandowski argued that the agility of a bike would be an asset in the race across the Mojave Desert, but the cool factor of going with two wheels—a move nobody else tried—helped him attract sponsors and media attention. It also earned the Blue Team a place in the final round of the 2004 competition, despite a shabby showing in the qualifying round. “It was such a PR attraction that we had to bring it to the desert and see what it did,” said Jose Negron, the Darpa official who organized the race.

Levandowski’s entry for the 2004 Darpa Grand Challenge, Ghostrider, crashed a few feet into a 142-mile race.

Kim Kulish/Getty Images

It didn’t do much: Because Levandowski forgot to turn on the stabilizing system, the motorcycle fell over a few feet from the starting line. Even for a race in which no vehicle went more than 7.4 miles, it was a particularly ignoble failure.

Levandowski and his teammates reprised the effort for the 2005 Grand Challenge, but Ghostrider was never a serious threat to the more capable vehicles developed by the likes of Carnegie Mellon and Stanford universities. The second time around, Levandowski’s bid ended in the qualifying round. But his high-profile presence set him up for a career in what he would help make a booming industry.

Going Pro

Levandowski didn’t find success at the 2005 Grand Challenge, but he did find his next venture. In the garage spot next to his (the qualifiers were held at the Fontana Speedway in San Bernardino County) was Dave Hall, who came to the race with a new invention, the first lidar scanner created for an autonomous vehicle. When Darpa announced plans for another autonomous vehicle race, the 2007 Urban Challenge, Hall pivoted his speaker company, Velodyne, into the lidar business. His spinning sensor, using 64 laser beams, offered a far more detailed view of its surroundings than any competitor. Hall hired Levandowski to travel the country and sell it to teams competing in the race. Of the six teams that completed the Urban Challenge, five had paid $75,000 for a Velodyne lidar.

One of those teams counted Levandowski as a member. Stanford computer scientist Sebastian Thrun had met the young engineer at the Grand Challenge and was impressed by the tech in the self-riding motorcycle. In the runup to the Urban Challenge, Thrun was working on Google StreetView. He hired Levandowski to work on the hardware for that effort, as well as for Ground Truth, where Google created its own maps of the entire planet.

Presaging a tendency to play multiple angles simultaneously, Levandowski didn’t just work for Thrun and Hall in this period. He did some consulting around unmanned tech for defense contractor Ensco (representatives for Ensco did not reply to a request for comment or to confirm Levandowski’s employment). And in May 2007, he incorporated 510 Systems. The Berkeley-based company made hardware that combined data from various sensors on a vehicle, including lidar and GPS, making a coherent, detailed view of what they captured. 510 did work for various outfits, even helping produce the lidar-themed music video for the Radiohead song House of Cards. One of its biggest customers was Levandowski’s employer: Google. Levandowski had the tech giant pay his startup to assemble the hardware rigs for its mapping cars.

Chauffeur

Amidst all that work, Levandowski found time to get himself on TV. In 2007, he appeared in an episode of the Animal Planet show Chasing Nature, in which he and other young engineers created contraptions that let them leap like dolphins. (Wearing a back-mounted air cannon and flippers while being towed by a boat, Levandowski flew the farthest: 20 feet.) He followed that in 2008 with the Discovery Channel’s Prototype This! where he rigged a Toyota Prius with rudimentary self-driving skills. With the help of a police escort (and suffering one minor crash along the way), the car carried a pizza through San Francisco and over the Bay Bridge to Treasure Island. The show didn’t mention Levandowski’s association with Google, and the car bore stickers for 510 Systems as well as another company Levandowski had incorporated, in 2008, to work on driverless tech: Anthony’s Robots.

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The episode aired in December 2008, around the time Google cofounder Larry Page tapped Thrun to start a self-driving-car effort, building on the success of the Urban Challenge. To staff what they called Project Chauffeur, Thrun recruited the best minds from the Darpa contests, including Carnegie Mellon’s Chris Urmson. Thrun put Levandowski—the rare team member without a PhD—in charge of hardware, extending the unorthodox relationship between 510 Systems and Google. Levandowski’s company built Google’s first fleet of autonomous Priuses. In interviews earlier this year, Levandowski said the Google higher-ups were fine with the orthodox arrangement, and various Chauffeur members said that Levandowski’s dual roles were an open secret.

As Chauffeur considered how to commercialize its technology, Levandowski fought for control of the team. In May 2011, according to emails made public during the Waymo v. Uber case, he threatened to quit if he wasn’t put in charge. “If he is the single leader, a good number of team members will leave,” Thrun told Page in an email. Levandowski didn’t get the top spot, but he didn’t come away empty handed. By this time, 510 Systems had started to develop its own lidar scanner, hoping to liberate itself from Velodyne’s steep prices. Another company was looking to acquire the startup, but Levandowski instead sold both 510 and Anthony’s Robots to Google for about $20 million, half of which went to Levandowski and half to his roughly 50 cofounders.

From Otto to Uber, Pronto

After losing his bid to take over Chauffeur, Levandowski found himself sidelined at Google. In early 2013, he lost his role as hardware lead and was put in charge of Google’s in-house lidar effort, building on 510 Systems’ work. He gradually became frustrated with the slow pace of what he felt had become “an eternal research project.” After starting by pursuing a cruise-control-like feature for highway driving, the team had pivoted to a fully autonomous vehicle. It had grown significantly and its cars had driven millions of miles, but it was nowhere near providing a commercial service.

By 2015, Levandowski was ready to leave, he said in an interview earlier this year. And while he’d previously considered striking out on his own, he now had suitors, because Google had competitors in what had become a burgeoning self-driving space. Foremost among them was Uber, whose then-CEO Travis Kalanick saw autonomy as an existential threat to his driver-dependent company. Uber had poached a few dozen Carnegie Mellon researchers to jumpstart its own research program in February 2015, but the team struggled to meet Kalanick’s ambitious goals. That summer, Uber execs started meeting with Levandowski, who saw the appeal of working for the ride-hail company: Kalanick believed that unlike Google, Uber needed to deliver a self-driving car to survive. In meetings with the CEO, Levandowski explained how he could make that happen, and why lidar—his particular expertise—was a must-have sensor.

On January 7, 2016, Levandowski emailed Larry Page with a plea: “Chauffeur is broken,” he wrote, according to a document revealed during the civil suit. “We’re losing our tech advantage fast.” He offered to start a separate self-driving effort within Google, but was shot down. A few weeks later, after allegedly downloading those 14,000 files, he resigned. “I want to be in the driver seat, not the passenger seat, and right now [it] feels like I’m in the trunk,” he told Page.

In May, Levandowski announced his new venture: a self-driving truck company called Otto. Of its 30 employees, about half came from Chauffeur, a sign that Levandowski wasn’t alone in his frustration with the slow pace at Google. In August, Uber said it had acquired the startup for a whopping $680 million, making good on a tentative deal it had made with Levandowski back in January. Under Levandowski’s leadership, Uber’s self-driving program started accepting passengers in Pittsburgh (with human safety operators behind the wheel) that autumn.

The fall from grace came in February 2017, when Waymo filed its lawsuit. Levandowski announced he would assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and Uber fired him in May. But before long, Levandowski quietly started a new effort, called Pronto, to develop a driver-assistance system for semi trucks. When he made it public in December 2018, he dismissed lidar, a technology he had long evangelized, as a “crutch.” The real key to the self-driving future, he said, was computer vision and deep learning, a view shared by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Distancing his company from lidar, however, wasn’t enough to distance Levandowski from old allegations—and may not be enough to keep his long, winding, whirlwind journey from a penitentiary ending.

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