Confirmed: Patents public
Tesla makes its technology patents freely available to the public and promises not to sue anyone who uses the patent in good faith. The company, which has hundreds of issued patents and hundreds more pending, will continue to apply for future patents to protect itself from those others take out for the same technology. In a blog post, CEO Elon Musk explains:
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.
We believe that…applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.