But Page’s investigators may not have pieced all of it together were it not for a mistake from one of Waymo’s own lidar component suppliers. In February 2017, months after the Otto acquisition, the manufacturer accidentally included a Waymo employee on an email, an email which happened to include a schematic of a component from Uber’s most recent lidar design. The Waymo engineer noticed something peculiar; Uber’s lidar component looked like a carbon copy of Waymo’s hardware.
