While many in Silicon Valley have railed against patent wars in recent years, and some have lobbied Washington to reform patent law, Tesla’s taking an unprecedented step of opening all its electric car patents to outside use.
In a blog post on Thusday, Musk said Tesla has removed the patents decorating the wall of the company’s Palo Alto headquarters — a symbolic move to coincide with this announcement. Tesla’s billionaire cofounder and CEO writes that the company “will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.”“We felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs 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.”Musk lamented that most major auto manufacturers have EVs that aren’t attractive to consumers due to their limited range, if they have EVs at all. With 100 million new vehicles hitting the roads every year, Musk believes there is plenty of room for everyone manufacturing EVs to thrive.
“Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has
repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined
competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and
motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying
the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than
diminish Tesla’s position in this regard,” Musk concluded.
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