Waymo sues the California DMV to hide its safety details, such as descriptions of driverless car crashes, and says the data should be designated a trade secret
Los Angeles TimesRuss Mitchell
Context & Ripple Effects
Waymo's trade-secret instinct here is well-worn: the company built its legal identity on the Waymo v. Uber fight over stolen self-driving secrets, so classifying its own crash reports as proprietary is a consistent extension of that playbook. What's new is the target — not a rival, but the state regulator that holds the public record of driverless car crashes.
The stakes are immediate because California's DMV is one of the few places where autonomous vehicle incident details land in public files, and Waymo is asking a court to reclassify that record as corporate property. Weeks later it won exactly that, with a preliminary injunction letting it keep the tech and safety details secret.
First-order effects
Descriptions of Waymo's driverless crashes are pulled out of the California DMV's disclosable records right now, leaving regulators, journalists, and the public without access to the incident detail they previously could request.
The DMV loses control of what it can publish about the vehicles it oversees, and must defend its disclosure obligations against a company it regulates.
Second-order effects
Every operator running robotaxis in California now has a template: file safety data under trade-secret designation and litigate rather than disclose, raising the cost of oversight for the DMV across the whole fleet.
The counterweight cuts both ways — Waymo itself was forced into disclosures when a magistrate ordered it to reveal its deal terms with Lyft during the Uber case, showing courts will still compel openness when litigation demands it.
Third-order effects
If the injunction pattern holds, autonomous vehicle safety oversight structurally shifts from public records toward confidential filings, making regulators dependent on operators' voluntary summaries rather than raw incident data.
Trade-secret law becomes the default shield for AV operations, and the competitive question stops being whose cars are safer and becomes whose lawyers can keep the evidence sealed.
The trend: Autonomous vehicle safety data is migrating from public regulatory record to trade-secret-protected corporate information, with courts increasingly deciding what the public may know about driverless crashes.
Alphabet's Waymo is fighting the @CA_DMV to keep certain info hidden about its self-driving car crashes in California. It turns out that collisions involving @Waymo cars in California increased 3x last year, as did its fleet of SD cars. Details here: https://www.businessinsider.c…
Hm, sounds like information that general public should get access to? Also did they try to copy the black text and then paste it to a different document? 🙃 NHTSA might be a good source of this data too? https://www.latimes.com/...
IMO if your code or data or models has public risk, it should be open source. This is true of automated driving, it's true of software used as evidence in court, it's true of educational systems... https://twitter.com/...
So long as Waymo wants to test on public roads where it could hit pedestrians, this feels like public data. I have a right to know my risk of getting hit by a test autonomous vehicle. Now if Waymo wants to build some private roads to test... https://twitter.com/...
@Techmeme @russ1mitchell “The suit stems from a public records request to the DMV from an unidentified individual or entity seeking Waymo's driverless deployment application — the basic filled-out form, attachments of additional material, and responses to follow-up questions from…
AV companies: - The #1 factor to success is building trust Also AV companies: - Crash information needs to be secret because reasons - Laws need to protect us from cost of crashes - We don't need no stinking industry safety standards Cognitive dissonance much? https://twitter.com…