Engineer at the center of Google and Uber’s clash over autonomous tech returns to trucking

Anthony Levandowski, the autonomous tech engineer who was at the center of a prominent court battle between Google‘s self-driving venture Waymo and ride-sharing provider Uber, has started a new company aimed at vehicle automation, Pronto AI.

Levandowski writes on medium.com that Pronto AI will develop its first product, Copilot, for commercial trucks in the form of a Level 2 autonomous retrofit system.

“The market that we believe makes the most sense to engage first is the commercial trucking industry, which stands to benefit tremendously from an aftermarket product that will help truck drivers deliver their cargo anywhere in the world with greater safety and comfort than ever before,” Levandowski writes. “Another bonus, it’ll cost orders of magnitude less to deploy than anything else that’s been promoted so far.”

Pronto AI used its Level 2 tech to drive a car across the country without any human intervention in October.

(In addition to being the figure at the center of the court battle between Google and Uber, you may remember this story from Overdrive in late 2017, detailing Levandowski’s visionary — and somewhat scary — take on autonomous tech. He believes artificial intelligence will soon surpass human intelligence and has established a religion based around that idea.)