During the presentation of the financial data of the latest quarterly report of Tesla, Elon Musk revealed some interesting things. In particular, the number one of the car manufacturer has made it known that preliminary negotiations are underway with a large manufacturer to license the Autopilot and Full Self Driving technologies.
No other details have been added, so we don’t know which manufacturer is interested in Tesla’s Autopilot/Full Self Driving package. It’s worth noting, however, that the company has always been in favor of licensing its technologies. In fact, in 2014, the company decided to make its patents available to everyone for free. The automaker had chosen to embrace this “open source” philosophy with the aim of providing a common and rapidly evolving technology platform to advance the electric car industry faster.
More recently and precisely in June, Elon Musk had again said he was in favor of licensing Autopilot and Full Self Driving to other car manufacturers. A little more than a month after this announcement, here comes the news that Tesla could actually license these technologies.
Negotiations aside, the integration of these solutions developed by Tesla on other cars is certainly not simple since probably the car manufacturers should also equip their cars with all the specific hardware that today we find on Elon Musk’s electric cars. A job, certainly not easy.
One also wonders why a major manufacturer would embrace this technology developed by Tesla when perhaps it has already developed its own platform. It is difficult to think that car manufacturers can decide to “throw away” millions of dollars to adopt another technical solution.
However, multiple recent announcements from manufacturers who have decided to embrace Tesla’s charging standard in North America show that scenarios can change quickly. At this point we can only wait and see if these discussions will lead to any concrete results.
