The firm’s CEO Elon Musk said in a blog post that he initiated the move “in the spirit of the open source movement” to encourage the growth of the electric car industry.
“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,” he said.
Musk said Tesla had felt compelled to create patents out of fear that big car companies would copy its technology and overwhelm Tesla.
“We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programmes (or programmes for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.
“Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 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.”
Musk concluded that technology leadership is not defined by patents, which he described as “small protection indeed against a determined competitor”, but by the ability to attract and motivate talent engineers,
