Tesla motors opens up patents to all – could this start the electric car revolution?
MASSIVE news: Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla motors has just announced on the company’s blog that it will no longer be enforcing its patents: meaning the floodgates have been opened for rival manufacturers to use Tesla’s technology.
In the post, Musk explains his reasons for making such a move:
“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 Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.”
This helps to solve one of the major problems stopping electric cars from becoming commonplace: specifically, the lack of standards. By open sourcing all of the company’s patents, it means the likes of Ford, General Motors, Chrysler and all of the big players can build electric cars to the same spec – which could mean different models can share charging points more easily and so on.
Hopefully this will mean a faster roll-out of the technology – at the moment, as Musk points out, electric cars account for less than 1% of total vehicle sales.
So has Musk just fired the starting gun on an electric car revolution? Maybe he just wants all of the remaining fossil fuel for his futuristic spaceships?
