Elon Musk has made Tesla’s patents available to everyone

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk said Thursday that it won’t penalize any other company that wants to make products based on its patented technology for long-range electric cars. Musk said in a blog post that he is taking the action to encourage the auto industry to make more electric cars like Tesla’s Model S. “Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology,” he wrote. He says that technology leadership has been shown historically not to be driven by patents. “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,” he wrote. “We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen, rather than diminish, Tesla’s position in this regard.”

Noting that the global auto market is approaching 100 million vehicles annually and that, “It is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis,” CEO Elon Musk announced today that the automaker is making all of its patents freely available on a good-faith basis. In a blog post on Tesla’s website, the company said it originally feared others would copy its technology, so it was aggressive in protecting intellectual property. But the way things have played out, automakers are making barely any zero-emission vehicles at all, typically less than 1% of their total production. Tesla hopes this move will begin to change that. Musk held a conference call to discuss the move in more detail, and he clarified the company’s intentions: Tesla doesn’t believe this will change things overnight. And he’s right. Automakers take years to get new vehicles to market and longer still to ramp up production. Nissan’s Leaf, the leading EV in the world, which costs a fraction of the Tesla Model S only recently cracked the 100,000 sold mark after more than 3 years. Outside of Tesla, no pure zero-emission vehicle has achieved anywhere near those sales. But in a world with 2 billion vehicles, it’s a drop in the bucket.