Anthony Levandowski, the infamous self-driving car engineer whose shenanigans helped spur a multimillion-dollar lawsuit between Waymo and Uber, is back with a new project. According to The Guardian, Levandowski designed a camera-based advanced driver assist system (ADAS) called Co-Pilot, which is aimed at the long-haul trucking industry. And to help sell his new product, Levandowski took it for a test drive: a 3,000-mile journey from San Francisco to New York without any human intervention.

The coast-to-coast self-driving trip has long been held up as the ultimate demonstration of this emerging technology. Elon Musk repeatedly promised to deliver an autonomous cross-country trip, only to delay it again and again. If Levandowski actually accomplished what he says he did, it would be the longest recorded journey of a self-driving car without a human driver taking over.

“If there was nobody in the car, it would have worked.”

The cross-country drive commenced on October 26th on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and finished nearly four days later on the George Washington Bridge in Manhattan. Levandowski claimed to be sitting in the driver’s seat for the entire 3,099-mile journey, but he says he did not touch the steering wheels or pedals, aside from planned stops to rest and refuel. “If there was nobody in the car, it would have worked,” he told The Guardian. Notably, it took three attempts for Levandowski to complete the trip, he said.

Levandowski has posted a time-lapse video of his trip on the website of his new startup, Pronto.ai. (The video includes a puzzling voice-over by Charles Bukowski reading his poem “The Laughing Heart.”) Levandowski also took freelance tech journalist Mark Harris for a 48-mile ride along the California coast, during which Harris reported that Levandowski only took control of the vehicle once when it failed to merge into highway traffic.

The car he drove is a Toyota Prius that is outfitted only with seven cameras (six on the outside and one inside, facing the driver) and a trunk full of computing power. The driver-facing camera is intended to monitor driver attention and awareness. If the driver’s attention wanders, the vehicle will sound an alert and eventually shut down. Tellingly, Levandowski’s setup did not include the spinning LIDAR sensor on the roof that has become the most defining characteristic of self-driving cars, nor did it include the extremely detailed digital maps that other autonomous vehicle operators rely on. (In July, TechCrunch reported that Levandowski was behind a soon-to-launch startup called Kache.ai, but that appeared to be a placeholder name for Pronto.)

I took a 48-mile trip on highways in and around San Francisco with Levandowski. Performance was safe and competent, including lane changes. System did fail to merge into busy traffic once, and Levandowski took over. We also met a @Waymo car on city streets at the end.... pic.twitter.com/ZHepGx1iRI — Mark Harris (@meharris) December 18, 2018

Of course, Levandowski is a controversial figure whose claims should be taken with a grain of salt. During his time at Google, he secretly modified the company’s self-driving software so that the cars could drive on otherwise forbidden routes, according to The New Yorker. He was at the center of the lawsuit filed last year against Uber by Waymo, the self-driving division of Alphabet, for Levandowski’s alleged theft of 14,000 documents and the misappropriation of Google trade secrets. During depositions leading up to the trial, Levandowski repeatedly pleaded the Fifth. Uber fired Levandowski in 2017 and settled the lawsuit in February 2018.

During the trial in February, lawyers for Waymo painted a picture of Levandowski as a problematic employee who clashed with his new boss over his slower, more cautious approach to self-driving cars. Waymo CEO John Krafcik said that Levandowski had vehemently held that redundant systems for steering and braking were unnecessary. “I think it’s fair to say we had different points of view on safety,” said Krafcik in court.

New York magazine once attributed Levandowski as saying, “I’m pissed we didn’t have the first death” to a group of Uber engineers after a driver died in a Tesla on autopilot in 2016. (Levandowski has denied ever saying it.) His words would prove darkly prescient: in March, a self-driving Uber struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona.

In a Medium post, Levandowski referenced his reputation in the opening line: “I know what some of you might be thinking: ‘He’s back?’ Yes, I’m back.” He acknowledged that he has grown “frustrated... and impatient” with the slow pace of the self-driving industry. And he sounds off on the cautious approach to deploying cars — a characteristic that led him to take Uber’s “always be hustlin’” attitude to an alarming place.

Levandowski is a controversial figure whose claims should be taken with a grain of salt

Levandowski describes Co-Pilot as “highly capable level 2 system and not less,” which means it can handle most of the driving within confined parameters (highway driving), but it requires the human driver to stay alert. Pronto’s first product will be an aftermarket kit “that will help truck drivers deliver their cargo anywhere in the world with greater safety and comfort than ever before.” According to the website, Pronto is selling Co-Pilot for $4,999 per truck, which includes “bolt-on installation of our camera-based system, driver training and more.”

This would seem to place Levandowski in the same category as George Hotz, famed iPhone hacker and founder of Comma.ai. Both are creating camera-based, aftermarket ADAS products that are intended only for highway driving, and both enjoy reputations as rebellious bad boys who flout the conventions of the industry.

Levandowski also wears another, less obvious hat: church founder. Last year, he filed paperwork to create a religious organization called Way of the Future. According to Backchannel, the purpose is to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.”