Month: April 2020

Enlarge / Anthony Levandowski, then-VP of engineering at Uber, in 2016. Levandowski co-founded self-driving truck startup Otto and then led Uber's self-driving technology efforts before being fired in 2017. (credit: ANGELO MERENDINO/AFP/Getty Images)

Alphabet's huge legal battle with Uber over self-driving technology ended two years ago. But the engineer at the center of that fight, Anthony Levandowski, is still facing legal and financial headaches. On Monday, he told a federal bankruptcy court in California that Uber was contractually obligated to cover a $179 million legal judgment that Levandowski owes to Google. Levandowski asked the court to order Uber to enter arbitration on the matter.

Levandowski claims that Uber was fully aware of the circumstances of Levandowski's 2016 departure from Google when Uber acquired Levandowski's self-driving startup, Otto, later the same year. Prior to the acquisition, Uber hired a firm to look into the background of Otto and its founders. Levandwoski says he cooperated fully, giving investigators access to his email accounts and personal files.

According to Levandowski, the investigators found—and told Uber—that Levandowski had files belonging to Google on his devices and had tried to recruit a number of Google employees for his new company while he still worked for Google. Levandowski claims that he repeatedly warned Uber management, including CEO Travis Kalanick, that Google was likely to sue if Uber bought Otto. But according to Levandowski, Kalanick wasn't concerned. "Uber eats injunctions for breakfast," he allegedly told Levandowski.

Enlarge / A Frontier Communications van. (credit: Getty Images | jetcityimage)

As Frontier Communications moves closer to an expected bankruptcy filing, the ISP told investors that its troubles stem largely from its failure to invest properly in upgrading DSL to fiber broadband.

The presentation for investors, which is included in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, said that "significant under-investment in fiber deployment and limited enterprise product offerings have created headwinds that the company is repositioning itself to reverse." Much of Frontier's fiber deployment was actually installed by Verizon before Verizon sold some of its operations to Frontier.

About 51 percent of Frontier revenue comes directly from residential consumers, with the rest mostly from wholesale and business customers. Frontier said the residential segment that provides most of its revenue "has the highest monthly churn," meaning that customers are leaving the company in large numbers. DSL-customer losses are expected to increase, Frontier said.

• 

  Pretty much everyone loves a VW T1 bus, and they should love this one even more because it's electric. [credit: Volkswagen ]

Everyone has different ways of coping with the coronavirus shut-in. People working from home are spicing up their teleconferences with animated backdrops. Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson has grown a beard. And I've been getting even more lazy about reading all the news alert emails that OEMs send me each day, which is why I've only just found out about a new electric Volkswagen bus that's going on sale in Europe. No, it's not the crowd-pleasing ID Buzz—it's called the e-BULLI, and it's an official electric restomod of a classic 1966 VW T1 Samba Bus, the product of a collaboration between VW's commercial vehicles division and a company called eClassics.

(For the uninitiated, a restomod is a "vehicle that has been put back together with the addition of new modern or aftermarket parts that were not on the vehicle when it came from the factory.")

Out goes the 43hp (32kW), 75lb-ft (102Nm) air-cooled flat-four engine, along with the transmission, fuel tank, exhaust, and so on. Instead, the rear wheels are driven by an 81hp (61kW), 156lb-ft (210Nm) electric motor borrowed from the e-up!, an adorable little electric city car that went on sale in Europe in late 2019. As there's more space in a T1 bus than an e-up!, e-BULLI gets the benefit of a slightly bigger lithium-ion battery—in this case, one with 45kWh of useable energy, which is mounted amidships in the bus's floor.