Waymo has narrowed the claims in its lawsuit against Uber over self-driving car technology. Alphabet's self-driving car company dropped most of its patent claims in an effort to streamline a planned October trial.

Uber was sued in February, when Waymo dropped the bombshell allegation that a former Uber engineer, Anthony Levandowski, stole more than 14,000 files while working at Google. Levandowski hasn't denied the downloads, instead asserting his Fifth Amendment rights. Meanwhile, Uber fired Levandowski and defended itself, saying Waymo's trade secrets never made their way onto Uber servers.

With fiery disputes over discovery erupting practically every week, Waymo's patent case was a kind of corollary to the main show. Uber has used two different types of "lidar," the main technology at issue in the case. Lidar is a system for using lasers to allow self-driving cars to "see" the streetscape around them. Uber gave its prototypes the names "Spider" and "Fuji."

After getting a closer look at Spider, Waymo has agreed to drop most of its patent case. The "Fuji" design doesn't use a "common lens" design, as described in most of Waymo's patents. While Spider does use a common lens, Uber has stated that the Spider design never matured into a working prototype.

In a stipulation (PDF) filed this morning, Waymo dismisses its patent claims with prejudice but reserves the right to accuse the Spider design of infringing the three patents should it come back into use. Waymo is now pursuing a single patent claim, which is still scheduled to go to trial later this year, along with trade secret allegations.

“Uber has assured the court in statements made under penalty of perjury that it no longer uses and will not use that [Spider] device, so we have narrowed the issues for trial by dismissing the patent claims as to that device, with the right to re-file suit if needed," a Waymo spokesperson told Ars via e-mail.

"Waymo's retreat on three of their four patent claims is yet another sign that they have overpromised and can't deliver," an Uber spokesperson told Ars via e-mail.

US District Judge William Alsup has been overseeing the litigation, and he has said the evidence that Levandowski downloaded trade secrets is extremely strong. Still, Alsup has been skeptical about Google's patent claims. He has suggested they drop the patent portion of their case entirely to streamline the extremely fast-moving litigation, which is scheduled for an October trial.

"I think you're going to lose on all these patent claims unless you pull some rabbit out of a hat," Alsup told Waymo at a June hearing. Later at the same hearing, he told Waymo lawyers, "you should think a lot about just dropping the patent part of this case."