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Ford Spent $200,000 To Dissect a Limited-Edition Tesla Model X (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Ford Motor paid a sum of $199,950 ($55,000 more than the retail price) to buy one of the first sport utility vehicles made by Tesla Motors, reports Bloomberg, citing vehicle registration documents. The white Model X is a Founders Series with a vehicle identification number indicating it was the 64th one made at Tesla's factory in Fremont, California. The vehicle, with Michigan plates, has been spotted recently in the Detroit area. Automakers often buy cars made by competitors for road testing and for 'tear-downs' to reveal components and materials and how they're put together. But it's unusual to pay such a high price -- almost $212,000 after Michigan sales tax and title -- for such an early model.Well, this $200,000 could shave off hundreds of thousands of dollars in research and development.
disclaimer: im an automotive engineer.
What fords doing is also reducing their patent liability in the event --the likely event -- they come out with an electric car as well. Chances are great theyve torn down a nissan leaf and BMW's electric offering as well to avoid uncomfortable litigation similar to what they experienced when they inadvertently infringed on Toyotas hybrid synergy drive and ended up licensing it for their hybrid vehicles. Future ford vehicles will have to be carefully designed so as not to infringe on a wealth of other vehicles that made it to market first while detroit was busy cranking out another SUV with an electric tailgate for soccer moms.
companies that do this often times end up pretty exhausted. it takes thousands of human hours and a lot more than the cost posted to analyze these vehicles. In most cases major auto companies just suck it up, license the technology, and rebrand it accordingly. Chevrolet is an example of a company that tried to dance around the battery vehicle market and likely ended up frustrated enough to just add an engine to get around litigation with the Volt.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Tesla opensourced them. Citation: https://www.teslamotors.com/bl...
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Unfortunately, it looks like he's only talking about EV-related patents. I clicked that link hoping to find open-source plans (and ideally, source code) for retrofitting autopilot to my current car and was disappointed. : (
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Look at Elon Musk's and Tesla's past. Open use patents alone show the willingness to encourage "competitors" to duplicate their technology. Musk as always said that as soon as Tesla is self sustaining, he is going to get out and devote most of his time to SpaceX.
First sale doctrine prevents this sort of thing.