Tesla, the world’s leading manufacturer of electric vehicles, accused and filled a suit against its electric vehicle automaker rivals — Rivian.
According to Tesla, Rivian is stimulating employees of Tesla to leave their job and encouraging them to pouch the company’s trade secrets, confidential, and property information while leaving the firm.
Tesla also indicted Rivian by alleging that the rival startup has already recruited four of its employees who stole highly sensitive information while leaving. The largest automaker mentioned in the new suit that a total of 178 former Tesla employees are working at Rivian. And of which around 70 of them directly joined the rival startup.
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While Tesla is blaming its rival, Rivian defended itself with a statement to Tech Crunch: “We admire Tesla for its leadership in resetting expectations of what an electric car can be. Rivian is made up of high-performing, mission-driven teams, and our business model and technology are based on many years of engineering, design, and strategy development. This requires the contribution and know-how of thousands of employees from across the technology and automotive spaces. Upon joining Rivian, we require all employees to confirm that they have not, and will not, introduce former employers’ intellectual property into Rivian systems. This suit’s allegations are baseless and run counter to Rivian’s culture, ethos, and corporate policies.”
With investments from Amazon and Ford, Rivian is a significant player in the electric vehicle industry and had bagged high-profile deals from Amazon. The largest e-commerce company has ordered 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian, which are yet to be delivered by the Tesla rival. R.J Scaringe founded Rivian in the year 2009, and today the company has footprints in many countries such as Canada, California, Plymouth, Normal, San Jose, United Kingdom, and more.
This is not the first time Tesla alleged that its employees steal sensitive information and leave the company and joined rivals organizations such as Xpeng Motors and Zoox Inc.
It appears that Rivian has been caught doing evil. It may have to live it’s life without using any of Tesla’s patents, which Tesla had earlier said were open to others – not to those that steal, I expect.