The race between companies to be the first to perfect and commercialize driverless cars detoured last week into a court battle between the most ambitious contenders, Google and Uber. Mountain View, Calif.-based Waymo, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has accused the San Francisco-based ride-sharing service of stealing its designs and other proprietary information. The route for that alleged theft is through Otto, a startup co-founded by Anthony Levandowski, a former Google executive who led the company’s self-driving car project and quit in January 2016. A few days later, he founded a startup called 280 Systems, later changed its name to Otto and sold it to Uber in August 2016 for $680 million. He now heads Uber’s self-driving cars project. “Otto and Uber have taken Waymo’s intellectual property so that they could avoid incurring the risk, time and expense of independently developing their own technology,” says Waymo in the lawsuit it filed on February 23 with the U.S.…