Tesla and the open source patents

This week it became known that Elon Musk wants to make practically all Tesla patents freely available and usable. In effect, he is creating an open source model for the use of the technologies developed by Tesla. For some, this publication of patents is sheer economic nonsense, for others it is another groundbreaking, unprecedented coup by the genius Elon Musk. Read here why it is probably neither.

Patent open source opens up the mass market for Tesla

Tesla builds great cars. Anyone who has ever taken a spin in one knows that. Tesla’s problem is that the acceptance of electric cars is still relatively low. Although many people would like to buy such a car in principle, they are hesitant because of the lack of a supply network and the shorter range compared to combustion technology. What’s more, Tesla and Musk in honor, electric manufacturers do not yet enjoy the same standing with customers as the major car manufacturers. Musk also writes in his blog:

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.

By releasing the patents, Tesla hopes that the major manufacturers will advance electric technology faster and finally bring real electric vehicles onto the market. This will give Tesla various advantages:

1. The market is getting bigger because customer acceptance is increasing. The share that falls to Tesla is also increasing
2. The burden of innovation, which Tesla has led so far, will be distributed to other companies, and cooperation between Tesla and other car manufacturers will be further encouraged (and is already taking place today). The entire industry can take bigger development steps. The whole topic of electric vehicles will benefit.
3. Tesla does not have to spend money on patent disputes, so it can simply save costs

Overall, the release of the patents will therefore help Tesla to expand its business. This is no different to other products that are released in the open source spirit.

There has already been a patent exchange in the automotive industry

Anyone who thinks this is groundbreaking and unprecedented is mistaken. In the early years of the development of the automobile around 1890, the American patent attorney George B. Selden registered the patent for a motor car, even though he had never built a car himself. He thus held the de facto patent for THE car and was able to impose conditions on the car manufacturers of the time and collect royalties. It was not until 1911 that Henry Ford managed, at massive financial expense, to reduce the patent to the two-cylinder engine recorded in the patent document (which no one was using at the time) and thus free the entire industry from the burden.

As a result, the Automobile Manufacturers Association was founded, which institutionalized a free patent exchange with all US car manufacturers. Each manufacturer developed technology and applied for patents. However, all other manufacturers were able to use the patents for their own products. By the Second World War, over 600 patents had been registered and used by all manufacturers without any further hurdles. At this time, the US car industry was able to make a technological leap that a single company would not have been able to achieve economically or in terms of know-how.

This is exactly what Tesla is now trying to do again by releasing the patents. The chances are good that this will succeed. Perhaps not today or tomorrow, but the entire automotive industry will probably benefit from this over a longer period of time. As always when open source comes into play.