Elon Musk on the Tesla blog:
Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.
Elon wants to speed up electric car manufacturing as a whole, so he’s making Tesla’s entire patent portfolio available for use by other companies. That’s a hell of a move.
I think it signals two things:
1) In order for Tesla (and more broadly, Elon’s mission to address the carbon crisis) to be successful, they need to see other auto manufacturers with skin in this game; pushing regulators, informing consumers and building charging stations across the world.
2) The most important thing to the growth of Tesla is the ability to attract—and retain—the most talented engineers in the world. There are tons of smart people who want to work on something more ambitious than a social network, or a search engine. Elon is giving them a place to do that.
Here’s hoping the other auto makers are smart enough (and not too proud) to adopt some of the electric transport technologies Tesla have pioneered.