Tesla was conceived, according to Musk, to kickstart the industry. https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-

Tesla was conceived, according to Musk, to kickstart the industry. https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you And that's what it's done. Interesting that in three years, the landscape has changed a lot. > At Tesla, however, we 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. (2014)