Tesla's High-Tech Lawsuits in Silicon Valley War

An anonymous reader writes "After pressing charges against its chief competitor in the race for the world's first production electric sports car that we broke down here recently, Tesla Motors seems to be shifting from the high-tech company re-writing Detroit's script to another Silicon Valley startup trying to sniff out the competition. So says Engadget's legal analyst in an in-depth column breaking down the legal ramifications. From the article: "This could upset the whole race for major production of an electric car in the U.S., which may be the main result of this whole drama. If anything, that's a win for Tesla. Let's just hope the company that set out to upend the automotive industry achieves its competitive goals in the lab and in the marketplace — and keeps its future fights out of the courtroom.""

Not quit accurate.

[WindBourne]

Calling Fisker's Tesla's chief competitor is a lot like calling MS IBM's chief competitor. Fisker was a sub-contractor to Tesla and had signed on as just that. Apparently via documents, Fisker was not going to go into car development, just stay in design. During that time, Fisker found out how to build the car, as well as the relatively low cost of doing so (much easier than a gas car) and decided to create his own with a one-off design of the roadster. So he basically delivered less to Tesla than was promised and then used the internal information that he had acquired from Tesla to help design his own, and as well as obtain funding.

Almost certainly, Fisker will have to pay back all the money that they obtained from Tesla. The real question is, can Tesla block Fisker's new car company?

The true loser on this will be customers and the world. In a way, for Tesla/Spacex to be successful, they need to move with speed. Spacex has contractual obligations to meet, and tesla will have to compete against major car companies in about 2-3 years. This lawsuit is taking Musk away from Tesla core AND Spacex. Both of these companies are innovative and are pushing the industry forward. But if he gets bogged down in court, they will stall. It would be far better for Tesla/Spacex, if Musk settles with Fisker quickly and moves on. In addition, the more companies that are doing EV, or even REV, the better it is.

Re:Not a litigious person but,

[Anonymous Coward]

... after 2 years of watching a former contractor not make cars, Fisker decides that it's high time someone actually make electric cars instead of scam investors ... however, they get sued.

Hard to call

[BlueParrot]

Not a chance we can call this ourselves. It will be down to what evidence Tesla has for its allegations. If their claims are true then I have little sympathy for the guy ( forget trade secret laws, fraud and sabotage alone should land him a decent slap if proven true ). If these accusations cannot be proven, on the other hand, then Tesla deserves a great kick up the arse for making such accusations against a competitor without reliable evidence.
 

Re:Not quit accurate.

[Aranykai]

Reminds me of some other situations. Windows 3.1 for instance :P

Anyways, just wanted to say I enjoyed your post. Don't have mod points, but it was quite insightful.

Re:Hard to call

[Narpak]

Never the less Fisker has lunched a product in direct competition with one he designed on contract for Tesla. Even if everything is above board and legal he has still kicked his own reputation in the nuts.

Re:Familiar situation

[WindBourne]

They are delivering their roadster and are backed by a billionare with plenty of money. I doubt that this is the case. I think that the real issue here, is that fiskers delivered an inferior product to Musk while at the same time, stealing Tesla's IP to be able to create their own.

Re:What's the problem?

[Idiomatick]

There is an easy rule to follow. /. will ALWAYS support the little guy. Because the market is so shitty in most areas there is often 1 dominating leader. This eventually leads to garbage due to the lack of competition.
 
Anyways... tesla builds electrics cars that out race porsches how could you think it wouldnt be popular?

Re:Plug in hybrids not electric only

[bbn]

People who aren't automotive engineers always trivialize the implementation and think it's a great idea. Actual vehicle engineers realize that in many ways a series hybrid is the worst of both worlds: more complicated than an EV and a gas car combined, less efficient than an EV for short-range driving (because of the extra weight), and less efficient than a parallel hybrid (or even a normal gas car!) on long trips.

The so called series hybrid is very old tech. It used to be called diesel-electric and is what many locomotives use. If it was less efficient, it is curious how it came to be _the_ standard for diesel locomotives.

Yeah, I realize you said you wanted the generator to be removeable, but that's another fantasy of armchair engineers. Yes, it's possible to engineer your complicated system, but it will add unacceptable weight and cost. At least you didn't say you wanted a removeable (swappable) battery.

Some not so armchair engineers at Renault decided to implement battery swapping. They have announced to make 500,000 cars with that system. What makes you qualified, to denounce what a real car company like Renault is doing?

Re:Plug in hybrids not electric only

[loshwomp]

Considering that a "serial hybrid" is how diesel freight trains and M1-A1 tanks work, I'm less than convinced of your random dismissal of their potential. Especially with GM pushing exactly that concept as their next fuel design.

It's not a random dismissal; I'm an electric vehicle engineer, and I'm less than convinced by your use of GM (or their vaporware product) as an example of success.

Neither locomotives nor the tanks you mention use any type of electrical storage. Rather, the only reason for the the hybrid electric system in those vehicles is to replace what would otherwise be a very complicated ultra-high-torque transmission.

A removable generator is hardly the engineering nightmare you make it out to be. Heck, the darn thing has to be removable ANYWAY, for service/replacement/etc. Throwing in the manual and letting a dedicated owner do it themselves is hardly an engineering problem.

Like I said. Fantasy. Armchair engineers. Sure, the internal-combustion engine in your car is technically removeable. Along with the fuel system, exhaust system, cooling system, etc. Making their removal easy and practical for the uninitiated in a consumer product is just crazy.

Quick: how many Americans will buy a car they cannot drive from one end of the country to the next?

More than the number of people who have any desire to remove their engine. Economic reality will eventually cause cars in America to approach what they are elsewhere in the world: primarily for short-range travel. $4/gal gasoline has only caused whining. Real behavior change will happen as prices near $7 or $8.

I'm not sure what your point is; that's what gas cars are for. And driving across the country is, by and large, stupid, and it represents an astronomically small fraction of what we do with cars. But for those who want to do it, gas cars will be around for decades. (But no fair whining about fuel prices!)

Electric rail only makes sense if you don't have a more cost-efficient alternative. Even if all the fossil fuels go away and we are forced to produce all our own fuel, I wouldn't assume that hydrogen or artificial hydrocarbons won't be more efficient -- and both are every bit as long-term sustainable as pure electric.

Hydrogen is way less efficient, and artificial hydrocarbons are a joke. Electricity is the ultimate flex fuel -- you can make it from anything, and you can use it to power your rail directly with no further conversion or storage. (Round-trip conversion to hydrogen is about 25% efficient.)

Re:Not a litigious person but,

[Anonymous Coward]

Fisker is not building an electric car. Fisker is building a plug-in hybrid.

Re:What's the problem?

[Rei]

Lithium polymer? Why? Lithium phosphates, titanates, spinels, etc are far, far superior for automotive applications. Yes, they're also currently expensive (although your estimate on the amount of batteries needed is way overboard), but their raw materials are cheap, so under mass production, they can be expected to be quite cheap.

As for the amount of batteries. Let's go with something like the Aptera at 200Wh/mi. Cars like the Aptera are only 80Wh/mi, but we'll go with 200. That's 70kWh. For the pack to cost 120k, you'd be having to pay $1.50/Wh. While you could possibly pay that much on titanates currently (Altair certainly has their problems), that's not a realistic price, and certainly not realistic for mass production.

90% of it's cost is in it's batteries.

That's an even more ridiculous claim. They use off the shelf laptop cells, which are, what, $0.15/Wh to $0.20/Wh? They have, what, 52kWh packs? That's ~$10k for the cells.