The ongoing Waymo v. Uber lawsuit continues to yield more interesting information about the internal plans of the ride-hailing company and its self-driving car ambitions. Uber was recently compelled by the court to hand over copies of text messages sent between former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski. While there's no "smoking gun" in the redacted document that would settle the matter in Waymo's favor, the messages—sent between February and December 2016—do show a particular disregard for Elon Musk and Tesla's autonomous driving project.

Waymo says that Levandowski stole more than 14,000 secret files while he worked at Google, then departed to create his own startup, which was purchased last year by Uber for $680 million. Now Uber stands accused of using Google trade secrets in building its self-driving car project—charges that Uber vehemently denies.

Levandowski's texts have a particular relevance to the case since he hasn't answered many questions himself, instead pleading his Fifth Amendment rights to avoid testifying. Earlier this year, Uber fired Levandowski when he wouldn't cooperate with court-ordered document production.

PACER records show the exhibit containing the texts was filed by Uber attorneys late on August 11. It shows disparaging messages, first spotted by Mark Harris at IEEE Spectrum, that were sent by Levandowski to Kalanick during September 2016. Levandowski linked Kalanick to a Business Insider article about George Hotz, another controversial Silicon Valley figure who is also working on autonomous vehicle design. Next, Levandowski shared a clip of a fatal Tesla crash that happened in China in January 2016, along with the following comment:

Tesla crash in January which implies Elon is lying about millions of miles without incident. We should have LDP on tesla [sic] just to catch all the crashes that are going on. Got this from ford [sic] who's debating call[ing] him out on his shit.

The revelation of a second fatal crash involving Tesla's Autopilot emerged during that company's public divorce with Mobileye, and it appeared at odds with then-recent statements by the Tesla CEO citing that its semi-autonomous driving system compared favorably with the safety of human drivers. The following week, Levandowski had it out for Musk again; in particular, Musk's anti-lidar stance:

we've got to start calling Elon on his shit. I'm not on social media but let's start "faketesla" and start giv[ing] physics lessons about stupid shit Elon says like this: "We do not anticipate using lidar. Just to make it clear, lidar essentially is active photon generator in the visible spectrum—radar is active photon generation in essentially the radio spectrum. But lidar doesn't penetrate intrusions so it does not penetrate rain, fog, dust, and snow, whereas a radar does. Radar also bounces and lidar doesn't bounce very well. You can't do the 'look in front of the car in front of you thing.' So I think the obvious thing is to use radar and not use lidar." The photons stop acting like photons at 77Ghz we at least need the geeks on our side and start calling the BS out. Any objections?

Tesla is currently fusing data from optical cameras, a forward-looking radar, and ultrasonic sensors to give its cars situational awareness of the environment around them. But almost every other company developing autonomous vehicles—including Waymo and Uber—uses lidar sensors in the mix.

The final exchange took place in October 2016, sparked by a visit Levanodowski made to Tesla the day before. Kalanick asks Levandowski about whether he thinks Tesla will get to level 5 autonomous driving:

What do you think chances are he has level 5 in 20% of a given city?

Levandowski does not rate Tesla's effort:

He's trippin' but might/will blame regulatory as to why it's not available 2x human safety Looks like we'll know what it's like soon

We reached out to Uber, which declined to comment on the contents of the messages.

As my colleague Cyrus Farivar noted earlier today, perhaps one lesson for executives to take home from this case is the need to use more ephemeral messaging platforms. Or to paraphrase my old boss when I worked at the National Institutes of Health, "never write anything in a text message you don't want to see on the pages of Ars Technica."