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Anthony Levandowski, the former head of the self-driving car research program at Uber, has been indicted on 33 charges related to stealing secrets from his former employer Waymo, the autonomous driving arm of Google. Federal prosecutors allege Levandowski downloaded 14,000 files, including circuit board layouts and LiDAR designs, from Google's self-driving vehicle division and stored them on a personal laptop.

Starting later this year, Fiat Chrysler (FCA) will begin offering cars with an online 'ecosystem' headlined by an infotainment system running Google's Android operating system, and using cloud services from Harman, part of the sprawling Samsung conglomerate. Cars equipped with the new system will have a new Android-based infotainment setup with over-the-air updates, built-in app support, satellite navigation, automatic emergency calling, and smartphone connectivity.

Google's self-driving cars, operating under the Waymo name, required human intervention just once every 11,154mi (17,950km) in 2018, comfortably making it the industry leader for disengagements. Waymo vehicles drove a whopping 1.2 million miles (1.93 million kilometres) in California last year, equating to a "50 per cent reduction in the rate of disengagements and a 96 per cent increase in the average miles travelled between disengagements" compared to 2017.

The list of manufacturers planning to use Google for their infotainment systems has grown from two to five, with Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi announcing Android will underpin its alliance-wide infotainment system from 2021. Under a new agreement, vehicles in the alliance will rely on Android for their infotainment, opening the door for Google Maps integration, among other Google Play apps designed specifically in-car operation.

Volvo Cars will embed Google Assistant, Maps and the Google Play Store in its next-generation Sensus infotainment system. As announced in May 2017, the replacement for Volvo's current infotainment system will be based on Google Android – something Audi is also planning. Although both system will have the same software skeleton, each manufacturer will be able to make the system look like their own.