S

peeding is the least of Anthony Levandowski's troubles. We'll get to that in a minute.

Levandowski is the former star Google engineer who left the company's self-driving car program to launch a self-driving truck startup which was, in very short order, acquired by Uber for $680 million.

The engineer's move from one of the world's most powerful companies to one determined to dominate the field of transportation triggered a chain of ugly consequences: Google's Waymo autonomous vehicle unit, alleging that Levandowski had absconded with digital files key to the company's technology, sued Uber for stealing trade secrets; Uber fired Levandowski before settling the case; and now, a federal grand jury has indicted Levandowski on criminal charges of stealing Google's secrets.

Levandowski, due back in court as early as Wednesday, has pleaded not guilty. His lawyers have assured the world he will beat the rap.

But what if he can't find his way past the fix he's in, one that could lead to prison time, millions of dollars in financial penalties and loss of his sizable fortune?

In a way, Levandowski seems to have anticipated the question in interviews and in less direct pronouncements. Mistakes — even big mistakes — are part of the price of technological progress. You just keep going.

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eporter Charles Duhigg, in a piece for The New Yorker last year, examined Levandowski's career and the Google/Waymo trade secrets lawsuit against Uber.

The story portrays Levandowski as an iconoclast and out-on-the-edge risk-taker, just the type that Google leadership was looking for to take on the challenge of building its self-driving vehicle program.

"If it is your job to advance technology, safety cannot be your No. 1 concern,” Levandowski says in the article. "If it is, you’ll never do anything. It’s always safer to leave the car in the driveway. You’ll never learn from a real mistake."

As an example of that attitude at work, Duhigg relates a story in which Levandowski is said to have been at the wheel of a self-driving Google vehicle involved in a near-crash with another car. The second car spun out and ended up in a freeway median, Duhigg writes, and Levandowski's passenger suffered a serious back injury.

"Levandowski, rather than being cowed by the incident, later defended it as an invaluable source of data, an opportunity to learn how to avoid similar mistakes," Duhigg reports. "He sent colleagues an email with video of the near-collision. Its subject line was 'Prius vs. Camry.' "

Levandowski, who launched several startups before and during his tenure at Google, left the company in early 2016 and started Otto, which focused on self-driving technology for the long-haul trucking industry. Uber bought the company months later, and the newly acquired firm made a splash in October 2016 with the announcement that its technology had enabled a self-driving semi loaded with beer to safely navigate a 120-mile route on Interstate 25 in Colorado.

Then came the Google/Waymo lawsuit, Uber's dismissal of Levandowski and last week's criminal charges.

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ut sometime between the day in 2017 when Uber fired him and the day he appeared in San Jose federal court to enter a plea of not guilty, Levandowski took a long drive. The journey was a first of sorts, and under other circumstances, it might have drawn more attention.

Last October, almost exactly two years after Otto's highly publicized Colorado beer run, Levandowski climbed into the driver's seat of a Toyota Prius in San Francisco, headed north across the Golden Gate Bridge, then kept going all the way across the country, ending at New York City's George Washington Bridge less than four days later.

It wasn't an all-time speed record, and it wasn't the first time someone made a mind-numbing cross-country drive.

The unique part of the trip, which wasn't disclosed until December, was that Levandowski's vehicle was outfitted with advanced driver-assist technology developed by his latest startup, Pronto. Levandowski and the company say the vehicle made the entire trip "without any human intervention," save for refueling and rest breaks. The trip, Levandowski explained, was part of realizing "my life’s passion to make the life-saving potential of autonomous vehicles a reality."

Pronto, which like Levandowski's Otto is marketing a self-driving system for the trucking industry, published a time-lapse video of the trip. After downloading it and watching it frame by frame, a few interesting patterns emerge:

The Pronto system, or at least the version used for Levandowski's drive, has a lead foot.

As Levandowski sets out across the Golden Gate Bridge, which has a highly publicized 45 mph speed limit due to a history of deadly crashes, his vehicle quickly accelerates to 55 mph.

Alan Dunton, a Pronto spokesman, said in an email last week "the vehicle's speed was set by the system and was based on the surrounding traffic flow and posted speed limit, among other things using Pronto's proprietary technology."On the Golden Gate Bridge, he said in essence, that by exceeding the speed limit by 10 mph, the car's software was just keeping up with faster traffic and trying to stay safe and legal. Dunton points out the video shows Levandowski's Prius is passed repeatedly by faster traffic in the three northbound lanes.

"If they were going 10 mph slower, they would have impeded traffic, which is against California's basic speed law," Dunton said.

Does that argument hold water with the California Highway Patrol, responsible for enforcing the speed limit on the bridge?

"No. Absolutely not," said CHP Officer Andrew Barclay, with the CHP's Marin County unit. "They could be pulled over for speeding at that point."

Barclay said the state's "basic speed law" — "no person shall drive a vehicle upon a highway at a speed greater than is reasonable or prudent having due regard for weather, visibility, the traffic on, and the surface and width of, the highway, and in no event at a speed which endangers the safety of persons or property" — would not apply in the situation Dunton described.

Dunton didn't address the numerous other occasions the Prius is seen speeding as it crossed the country, except to say "they generally drove with the flow of traffic."

Pronto — Italian for "road boulder"?

The company's video shows Levandowski and his Prius hanging out in the left lane, aka the "fast" lane, for inordinately long stretches.

For instance, at mile 151 of the trip, on Interstate 80 near the Sierra foothills town of Colfax, the vehicle takes to the left lane. And stays there. And stays there. And stays there. All the way across the mountains, through Reno and well beyond, even as faster vehicles pass on the right. The car finally returns to the right lane just east of the town of Fernley.

Asked about why the Pronto system didn't return the vehicle to the right lane to allow passing, as courtesy and the vehicle code would dictate, spokesman Dunton explained that the software was set to avoid possible conflicts with traffic entering the roadway from the right.

"For the purposes of this early demo, (the team) wanted to maximize the chances of achieving this amazing milestone and therefore decided to have the car drive in left lane for a significant portion of the trip to reduce the number of merges with traffic," Dunton said.Why reduce the number of merges? Read on.

Houston, we have a problem. With merging.

Last December, after announcing Pronto's successful cross-country road trip, Levandowski took The Guardian's Mark Harris for a 48-mile ride-along. Harris said the system performed "safely and competently," though Levandowski was forced to take control of the self-driving Prius at one point because it "failed to merge into busy traffic."

What can go wrong in a merge?

The Pronto video, brief as it is, shows one harrowing example, a little more than 40 minutes into the trip, as Levandowski and his Prius attempt to merge onto eastbound Interstate 80 off of Highway 37 in Vallejo.

As the Prius heads up the ramp – and up a moderately steep grade where entering vehicles are required to merge left as the number of freeway lanes is reduced gradually from six to four – the vehicle briefly accelerates to 72 mph. However, the Prius remains in the far right lane to the point where it ends and the vehicle is forced to move to the left. By that time, the vehicle is rapidly overtaking a much-slower-moving dump truck.

One imagines this was an "oh, shit" moment for Levandowski, who was at the outset of a 3,100-mile trip in which he hoped not to touch the vehicle's controls except when he needed to gas up, pee or sleep.

What the car did, apparently with no input from him, was brake dramatically on the freeway – slowing to just 17 mph, according to the video – to avoid rear-ending the truck. The video doesn't show whether there was traffic immediately behind the Prius or whether other vehicles were also required to slow down. Eventually, the merge was completed and the Prius went on its way.

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eyond depicting the apparently successful road trip, the Pronto video carries another message that may be relevant to Levandowski's current situation and his attitude toward it.

The message comes in the video's sonorous voiceover. An unidentified, uncredited voice intones words identified at the end only as "poetry by Charles Bukowski."

In fact, the audio of the reading is borrowed from Tom O'Bedlam, a sort of YouTube cult figure known for his taste in verse and his memorable reading style.

The "poetry by Charles Bukowski" is a mash-up of two well-known pieces, "The Laughing Heart" and "Roll the Dice," by the late Los Angeles poet. Both poems speak of the necessity of seizing the day and making one's life count for something. The latter piece, too, talks about pursuing dreams regardless of the cost.

We're guessing the poetry was chosen and hacked together because of the line "if you're going to try, go all the way" — you know, like the Prius in the video as it completes its cross-country ramble in the unromantic morass of a morning commute into New York City.

But the lines that get your attention, read in funereal tones over video images of Levandowski's vehicle racing across the United States in frantically sped-up motion, are a little farther down:

"... go all the way.
this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.
go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation. ..."

Really? Jail? Homelessness? This vision of building a self-driving vehicle could mean losing your family, livelihood, sanity and freedom?

You wonder if that's where Anthony Levandowski really saw his career and life heading.