Tesla Motors Just Opened Their Electric Car Patents To Everyone

It's crazy that new cars still run on gas. The technology exists to have cleaner vehicles, and if auto manufacturers had put their muscle behind it decades ago, we could have electric cars that are comparable with our gas-guzzlers. There are some electric cars on the market, and some hybrids, but it seems like old-fashioned, heavily polluting, gas-dependent cars remain the status quo. As the world careens past the global warming tipping point these cars are only making things worse.

One of the companies that have drawn a ton of attention for their electric cars is Tesla Motors, run by oddball billionaire Elon Musk. Musk's one of those forward thinking types who can sometimes come across as absolutely silly but who also, sometimes, push human society forward in big ways. His SpaceX is just one way that Musk is trying to improve the world while making a dollar; Tesla produces really high end, very fancy, quite lovely cars that have zero emissions - another way of making bucks and helping the world. 

But it's not enough. Musk today announced that Tesla will not combat companies that use Tesla's patents in their own attempts to build electric cars. He has come to the conclusion that these patents, rather than protecting his company, were hurting everybody else.

[W]e felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.

At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with limited range in limited volume. Some produce no zero emission cars at all.

Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. 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.

We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. 

How is this going to work? I don't know - I don't even know that it will on any level at all. But there's something inspiring about seeing Musk decide to just cut through a lot of red tape and simply say "Jesus Christ, why aren't you guys making ecologically sound vehicles? Here, we figured it out, use what we've learned."

Will  the car companies follow suit? The reality is that the oil lobby is a major factor in holding us back from clean fuel cars; there's too much money in gasoline to give it up so easily, even as oil destroys the environment and sparks wars. 

I'm sure someone will explain why this doesn't make a difference or why the legal departments of other companies will never allow them to get involved in using Tesla patents or some other cold blast of realty, but at this moment I'm just going to be excited that someone is stepping forward to try something new to fix a problem whose solution is just sitting there, waiting for us to decide to use it.