CEO of Tesla Motors Elon Musk has offered all of the company’s patents to the global community, “in the spirit of the open source movement”.
He hopes this gift will help advance the electric vehicle market, which has been neglected by the traditional car manufacturers.
“Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology,” said Musk in a post on the Tesla blog.
Tesla Motors succeeded where others failed, by building an electric vehicle that appeals to the traditional car enthusiast – something that is especially challenging in the US, where manufacturers often adopt the “bigger is better” design philosophy. So it’s highly unusual that the company has decided to give away its proprietary technology for free.
Musk said that in the early days, Tesla filed for patents in order to protect itself from large corporations which could steal the company’s ideas and then overwhelm it with their financial muscle.
He now admits that this approach was wrong – it turns out that despite Tesla’s success, traditional car manufacturers have little interest in electric vehicles.
“Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately two billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous.
“Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.”
In other words, giving away the patents should have little impact on Tesla’s bottom line. Experts suggest that the company might be planning to supply some of the parrtners who decide to use its patents with equipment such as batteries, further increasing its quite healthy revenues.
Do you know all about Green IT? Take our quiz!
Intel China responds after influential Chinese cybersecurity association called for a security review of its…
Gamers who sued Microsoft to halt its purchase of Activision Blizzard have agreed to the…
Meta has reportedly begun laying off staff across various departments, but as of yet there…
After blacklisting in 2020 and 2021, drone giant DJI reportedly says some of its imports…
A controlling stake in data centre cooling firm Motivair has been acquired by industrial giant…
New x86 ecosystem advisory group formed by Intel, AMD, as well as a slew of…
View Comments
I was moved to tears when reading the columns. No donations could have been greater. You did it before during the time of JP Morgan. Your Technologies have revolutionized the world. Thank you God bless