This is kind of unprecedented, but Tesla might just open up its electric car patents to other manufacturers.


On June 3, at Tesla's annual shareholder meeting at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, Elon Musk, the company's CEO, said that to drive the adoption of electric cars, Tesla was "playing with doing something fairly significant on this front which would be kind of controversial with respect to Tesla's patents."

Three days later, he told the BBC's Theo Leggett that he was on the right track when asked if he was planning to give technology away.


"We're trying to figure out how to accelerate the advent of electric cars and to the degree that we create technological barriers for them, it's not going to happen," said Musk. "We don't want to cut a path through the jungle and then lay a bunch of landmines behind us."

Giving away patents would be a refreshing change, especially in the technology industry where patent wars resemble Godzilla-M.U.T.O. clashes. We'd probably be in the future already if other companies followed suit.