Chinese Tesla Clones
wired.com
wired.com
It's not trivial to get an always-connected car working(as we've seen from other mfgrs). I think where you'll see Tesla succeed is using the aggregated data across it's whole fleet to make smart engineering/product decisions moving forward.
We've already seen this when the bumped up the spec on the 85D from 5.2s to 3.9s 0-60 based on real-world motor usage.
That's not how patents work.
A patent includes the description of how the invention works right in the application. Consequently, if you live in a jurisdiction where you don't fear prosecution, you can immediately clone the idea. The only way Tesla could have kept their ideas "secret" would have been to not patent them at all!
Tesla's patent pledge was just a public statement that, under certain conditions, they wouldn't sue.
That's exactly why SpaceX doesn't patent their technologies; the actors who would copy them are orgs they can't sue (nation states).
Hmm, I actually find that very unsettling in the context of this article and the recent VW debacle. Detecting fraud and recall worthy software failures was already a scary prospect. But a random companies' random engineers tuning a few thousand cars here or there to see what happens in real time.. I feel like we are about to enter a horrible new world where computer forensics meets regular forensics.
Hopefully they will use the same charging standard so they can use super charger network. I suspect Tesla wouldn't mind just making drive trains and super chargers for all the world's vehichles. There is also talk of giga factory as a product, so that's another possibility.
> 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.
[1]: http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-yo...
Look, electric cars are easy to build. I feel funny saying this but, well, it isn't rocket science. The vast majority of people have no need for the gizmos a Tesla has. They need to get from point A to point B and back in comfort and with reliability.
Is that difficult to achieve?
Well, considering an electric car has a thousand or more less parts than an internal combustion car, probably not.
Is that enough? Is the lack of an IC engine enough?
No.
You have to know how to design a chassis and suspension. There are plenty of people who do that for a living. No rocket science there.
You have to know how to make a good electric motor and controller. There are plenty of folks who do that too. Look at the electric forklift industry. Electric motors and their controls are solved problems, from switched reluctance through PM BM to AC motors, loads of people know how to design and build them. I'd venture to say a good number of them are made in China these days.
Well, how about batteries and battery chargers? Panasonic probably has that covered pretty well. They'd throw an entire engineering team at you just to sell you batteries.
I mean, an electric car is an overgrown RC car. Very, very simple at the core. The complexity comes in if you want to turn it into a computer on wheels. And, I would venture to say, a lot of that is probably not that difficult these days. Load it up with ChromeOS or something like that and go.
I am not diminishing the amount of work it would be to design and build a new electric car. It's monumental. All I am saying is I don't think it is as much about inventing new technology as much as money and execution in a business where most of the moving parts are well known solved problems.
I think Tesla --and the world-- needs to take this very seriously. The way the Chinese piss all over intellectual property and manipulate markets is despicable.
Tesla will never sell its cars - in africa.
And lets not forget that america was built on blatant coping of IP from europe for over 100 years !
Paradoxically this blatant copying is actually going to lead to strong IP in china in the future.
A country can go so far by copying others - they will always be behind america by 10-20 years.
Anyway China is not a real threat to american interest - the american govt is.
Africa is also not a very good place to sell electric cars in it lacks the required infrastructure it has at least 3-4 more decades of development until electric cars will be viable there. Africa needs cheap, dependable preferably multi-fuel (diesel/bio-diesel) cars, it might be able to handle hybrids but even that is pushing it.
China doesn't need to replicate Tesla, if they make an electric car which is just good enough it will have huge impact on the air-quality in the cities and sine China is pretty much the only country which is developing and building new nuclear power plants as well as leading the research into fusion when it will be able to make even a 1/3rd of a Tesla it should have enough emission free electricity to actual make a big difference.
China is also quite good at actually completing tasks it sets it's sights on no matter the "cost" or what the market says if the Government will put electric cars by 2025 as a mandate the rest will fall in line.
Just pointing out coping IP may be bad in the short term ( Tesla doesn't make as much money as they excepted ) - but in the long term its good for humanity.
Why?
The "R" in "R&D" is the expensive part. Very expensive. Ridiculously expensive in some segments (pharmaceuticals).
Doing the "D" part once someone paid for the "R" part is easy and cheap. That's what stealing IP is about. If "R" was easy and inexpensive everyone would do it. Not so.
The problem with saying "Oh, it's OK, China will make it better for humanity in the long run" is that killing-off companies that are engaged in heavy "R" creates a situation where all you have in the market is crap or you effectively freeze "R&D" for decades until the equation makes sense again or someone is stupid enough or rich enough to throw money at a problem.
Patents and IP protection make a lot of sense when used for real inventions, real "improvements in the art". It is when they are used by trolls who make nothing, contribute nothing to society and get in the way of progress that patents turn evil.
Stealing legitimate IP is a terrible thing. The only people who don't see it that way are those who have never devoted time, treasure and effort to find a solution for a difficult problem. That is when, in no uncertain terms, you absolutely get it.
In my case, I devoted ten years in a constant effort to develop a technology. It was extremely difficult work. I funded all of it and it cost a bundle. At the end of the process anyone could have just taken the "D" part and gone with it with very little effort in relative terms. Go through something half as intensive as that and you'll understand where I and others are coming from.
Or that the US economy hasn't collapsed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
"China and India have been infringing on US patents for 4 decades now and nothing has happened yet."
I just want to know how you came to that conclusion.
The problem with your atatement is that it requires access to data that may not be public. If I had not had IP stolen by a Chinese company I would not have some of the insights I gained during that experience. Mine isn't the only company that has had these kinds of issues. During my ordeal I got to meet other business owners affected by Chinese IP theft. Why? Because we got the State Department involved and that was the conduit through which I met others.
Unless you've had access at that level it would be hard for you to understand the subject. In our case the IP theft probably cost us $30 million dollars in R&D, over a hundred million dollars in lost sales and hundreds of very high paying jobs.
No, IP theft is a very serious problem.
Intel: Fab 68 Dalian, Liaoning, China
AMD: Fab 2 & Fab 7 Singapore
Fab 68 is a 65nm fab even tho it's their newest it's pretty much delegated for making non-vital parts.
The only Fabs Intel has outside of the US that are manufacturing CPU's and high-value components are in Ireland(24, 14nm) and Israel(28, 22nm currently will be Intel's first 10nm fab by mid 2016).
But anyhow no one doubts China has the capability to manufacture quality components, and they got better at developing internally as well many of the newer Chinese consumer electronics brands can quite easily compete with other Asian primarily Korean manufacturers quite well.
The Chinese automotive industry on the other hand well didn't had much success as far as designing goes their best cars currently are probably the MG (or which ever brand SAIC Motor uses these days) ones which are based on existing designs and IP from the MG Rover buyout, and although they look very modern allot of them are based on quite old designs even the newer MG's can still be traced to the Rover 75 and the Streetwise which were well kinda outdated designs to begin with.
I've drove the MG 6 when I was in China, it's not a bad car it looks quite nice the accessory pack of the leasing agency unlike in Western countries was probably couple of levels beyond what ever is normally sold in the local markets but it still felt like an older car, the steering, responsiveness breaking everything felt like a car from the late 90's early 2000's which under all the flare it kinda is.
When it comes to their old-chinaroo stuff well we all know what those things feel like and how they fall apart after 3 days.
For a knockoff hand bag its not an issue, for a car well.... some people even in China probably value human life enough to understand that there's that many corners you can cut before you turn your product into another government sponsored population control project.