China would be short sighted to cross Tesla right now. Tesla is way more valuable over the long term. It would ridiculously stupid to cross Tesla for a shitty copy of last year's code.
Prediction: The lawsuit will be prosecuted and resolved in favor of Tesla.
What does it matter if it takes China years longer to clone the tech through grey market means and RE versus legally actionable means like they are suspected of having done? Individuals in every company are trying to create this. Everyone else will try to copy or clone it. Some will try to misappropriate the IP. Lots of value to be captured or lost.
Nations that provide for their citizens by enabling them to reach their full economic potential will have an advantage over nations that have to buy the labor and output of another country. Skills and knowledge gaps are consequences of investment gaps on the individual level and cause productivity and capital gaps on the national level. International actors appear as countervailing and prevailing forces that create the conditions for a market solution but also encourage territoriality and IP protection schemes as well as other kinds of schemes regarding other people’s intellectual property.
Part of me feels disconnected from this whole argument. I would download a car. I don’t feel bad and I don’t think anyone should for feeling that way. Culture is free. If you didn’t want the world to know about it and use it you shouldn’t have shared your creation, knowledge, invention, or property with society by allowing them to legally acquire it. First sale doctrine and interoperability exceptions to copyright law are clear on this. If I buy a self-driving car, and get the title, it’s really, actually, legally my car now. If I can figure out how my car’s self-driving system works without violating any of the car vendor’s computers, that is my right to do so in order to adapt the car to my needs and desires. Provided I don’t interfere with or prevent the normal operation of the vendor’s computers this should be entirely legal. It is legal to modify the operation of the computers in the cars I own.
Writ large this means China will get their self-driving cars once the first people do because they will be in line buying them like everyone else. Then they will clone the tech just like everyone else. I don’t see what the big deal is besides all the money everyone feels they should be making and conversely all of the money to be saved by making your own system or cloning another. Like all displacement goods it will just take over the market and create a new one where self-driving is an implicit assumption of every car interaction and purchasing decision. It’s just so valuable a technology it won’t be possible to properly control it through traditional means if at all.
All of this is why I think the secret sauce of higher level self-driving to be a very real brass ring, that once snatched, will be hidden behind a velvet rope. It will be licensed and controlled remotely, not owned and operated by the end user and simply mediated by the car offline. I would expect future cars to have always online functionality to enable self-driving functionality checks simply for road safety reasons and also to deter IP leakage via encrypted firmware and remotely validated automatic updates. It will be interesting to see if any kind of open source challenger will appear in such a future. I hope we all get to see it sooner rather than later.
"Part of me feels disconnected from this whole argument. I would download a car. I don’t feel bad and I don’t think anyone should for feeling that way"
I see this come up on HN from time to time. How would you feel if a large company made millions of dollars on your open source project, and never gave anything back in return?
"Culture is free. If you didn’t want the world to know about it and use it you shouldn’t have shared your creation, knowledge, invention, or property with society by allowing them to legally acquire it."
This has very dangerous implications. If we have no intellectual property rights, large companies could just wait until small startups came out with a good idea..and it could be ripped off and copied. It only pushes us towards a world that's controlled by a couple of large corporations and governments.
"If I can figure out how my car’s self-driving system works without violating any of the car vendor’s computers, that is my right to do so in order to adapt the car to my needs and desires"
We aren't talking about reverse-engineering a car that you buy (which is legal). We are talking about an employee exfiltrating source code and other proprietary documents to be used at a competing company.
"Then they will clone the tech just like everyone else."
Sure, but who wants to be the first person to market and spend billions of dollars on R&D when you can just clone it after some other company does all of the hard work for you?
Another reason why we need IP laws is that innovation is actually stifled without them. China is a good example of this. I can't think of one thing innovative that came out of China in decades. Most are cheap (and many times worse) copies of technology from more innovative countries.
It reminds me of the current state of new drugs. The majority of new drugs are created in the US and are then cloned and sold for a much cheaper cost to countries with socialized medicine...mostly because they don't have to do any of the expensive R&D/clinical trials to get the drug to market.
"I would expect future cars to have always online functionality to enable self-driving functionality checks simply for road safety reasons and also to deter IP leakage via encrypted firmware and remotely validated automatic updates. It will be interesting to see if any kind of open source challenger will appear in such a future"
This is where most software has gone in the last decade (from download and install a copy to SAAS), so it makes sense.
Oh no! China fears the terrible might of Tesla, which sells fewer cars than even the smallest domestic manufacturer!
More likely, China will simply steal Tesla's technology, share it with domestic manufacturers, and tell Tesla to swallow their medicine or leave the market, like they've done with every other foreign manufacturer that tried to dictate terms.
It's pretty simple. Tesla has the best technology right now and likely will for the next few years. Causing Tesla to leave means China loses out on future technology. Ergo, China will likely side with Tesla. Witness the incredible subsidies and favorable loans Tesla has been receiving in China.
Rapid technology growth also slows the adoption of electric vehicles because it increases the complexity of manufacturing and the pricetag for their cars. China’s in the business of making products of lower quality but much lower cost, then flooding foreign and domestic markets so Tesla cant compete. And given the option, many people would choose an electric vehicle, if it was cheaper.
For tesla to continue rapidly developing new tech it needs cheap manual labor for production and large markets to sell in. If china floods the markets with cheap electric vehicles, tesla loses their markets, their economy of scale, their data collection etc.
China can steal trade secrets almost as easily from the US and they can from China, but they have significantly more leverage when the company has a physical presence and assets in the country.
China has been buttering up Tesla to make it easier to steal the technology by convincing then to move a huge portion of their manufacturing and process research into China.
But based on my talk with my friends in Shanghai Auto, and LandRover China (with Geely), the Chinese government pretty much are going to keep Tesla in China as the Catfish in the muddy water. The theory is to have a strong predator to force the weaker players to die and stronger to learn.
The government learned that the organizational structure inside Chinese domestic firms are not going to provide the soil for creative work.
Tesla is treated like a teacher, but they are not touched, as that defeat the whole purpose of having a strong predator in the market.
You might disagree, but I guarantee that Chinese government is not blind to where it needs to learn.
This is quite interesting to see written out explicitly. I've nothing to add save the fact that I'm continuously impressed with China's ability to raise up its technology sectors using just enough protectionism to make them sustainable without so much as to coddle them so that they don't lack viability on the global stage once they've been raised up. Huawei comes to mind.
> Xpeng said in a filing that it’s already assisted Tesla voluntarily and in response to a prior subpoena served on XMotors, including by turning over a forensic image of Cao’s laptop and more than 12,000 documents. The U.S. carmaker’s latest demand for information doesn’t change the fact that there’s no evidence that any Tesla trade secrets were passed on to Xpeng, the company said.
When even Bloomberg acknowledges that the accusations are shaky you have to start questioning Tesla's narrative (literally, there's a section of TFA called a "Questionable Narrative"). Musk is known for being paranoid about "short-sellers", maybe the same could extend to "ip theft".
> Tesla is finally learning the lesson that all other companies doing business in China have already learned.
The events described involve engineers working in the US and the entire thing is being judicated in San Francisco. It has nothing to do with "doing business in China".
Find it hard to believe there's anything valuable to steal from Tesla. Most the hardware is proprietary so stealing source for main computer would be kinda pointless.
Stealing neural net would be even more pointless - it's mainly built for US roads, to run on specialised AI computer and control specialised hardware and can probably be extracted via firmware update anyway.
Plus Musk is always claiming to open source their patents and innovate so fast that their old software is irrelevant.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about self driving car industry.
Hardware being proprietary doesn’t diminish the value of stealing code. In fact, there is much to be gained regardless of specific hardware, even if the code was super hardware dependent. And besides, what’s to stop them from developing similar hardware in the end? The point isn’t to just blindly run the code on their hardware, it’s to reverse engineer it.
There’s also much more to a neural net than just the training of it. Its methods and architecture can be re-applied to different situations, regardless of what a stop sign or roads look like.
In the same vein, iPhones use a different chipset than android phones but stealing Apple code and taking it to Google would still be of benefit.
This stuff would be useful. Self driving is getting to the point where it's a game of inches and there are only extremely hard problems to solve. Each major player definitely has non-overlapping sets of the solution. Understanding how their main compute works could hint at how their system works as a whole. Like how are they getting data from sensors? Are they doing HW acceleration? On which parts of the pipeline are they doing that and should we? How are they synchronizing all of their sensors to do sensor fusion?
It's clear that a self driving car will need to make use of a large suite of sensors which require tons of data processing. If Tesla is primarily camera based, it could be possible that they have invested in better cameras and better image processing algorithms + hw acceleration that competitors could learn from. Same goes for any serious player in this space.
> Disclaimer: I know nothing about self driving car industry.
I just wonder, why do you comment then? If you by your self-assessment know nothing, you would just be adding to confusion around the topic, or in the best case scenario would randomly get some correct fact or intuition and thus increase confusion even more because some people would assume the rest is correct. Why not just comment on the things you know something about?
I would read the post with implied ", right?" after every statement given the disclaimer. Sure, it would've been possible (and likely better) to phrase everything as questions directly, but raising interesting talking points to start a discussion is... kind of what we are here for.
> the Guangzhou, China-based maker of Tesla look-alike electric cars
The car in at the top really doesn't look like any of Tesla's cars. Googling around for the model[1] and comparing it to Tesla's SUV[0] they really don't really have any similarities that any two random SUV's wouldn't have save for the glass roof. Just look at the entire back profile[0][1] and the fact that the G3 has a fairly prominent carbon fiber front grill[?] where as Tesla always made it a point to leave a blank spot where a grill would've gone in their cars.
True, from that Autocar gallery the Xpeng's body shape looks more like a bad copy of a French car with a few incidental sprinklings of Tesla that could have been described to Xpeng's designers over a brief telephone call.
From the front it looks like a Tesla Model Y that was reproduced in balloon form—and then slightly overinflated.
The dashboard and driver display clearly too obvious liberties from the Tesla Model S, but that design is what... eight years old now? And the real value is in the software interaction design, not the coarse hardware alignment. Besides it's likely that Tesla will be doing a major refresh of the Model S/X interior within the next couple of years anyway, making the Xpeng look like a bad copy of a decidedly dated.
Could you provide an example of this "French car" that they copied? A google image search for "French SUV" doesn't turn up any cars that particularly resemble the G3. A search for "French electric vehicle" turns up with a bunch of Smart Car lookalikes. It's like whenever China is mentioned people turn into Markov chains and have to work the word copy into the rest of their sentence regardless of the reality.
Edit: You added a bit about the interior looking like a Model S's, which I agree with. Personally I believe touch screens in a car console should be illegal.
Apologies for not being clear. I wasn’t thinking about any specific French car, just that it had a bulgy, mid-2000s Peugeot/Citroen feel about it. Beyond that I’d describe its body shape as almost painfully generic.
I was not accusing the design of being a clone of a specific existing design. I was accusing it of being hideous.
41 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadPrediction: Tesla would be forced to withdraw it's lawsuit.
Prediction: The lawsuit will be prosecuted and resolved in favor of Tesla.
Nations that provide for their citizens by enabling them to reach their full economic potential will have an advantage over nations that have to buy the labor and output of another country. Skills and knowledge gaps are consequences of investment gaps on the individual level and cause productivity and capital gaps on the national level. International actors appear as countervailing and prevailing forces that create the conditions for a market solution but also encourage territoriality and IP protection schemes as well as other kinds of schemes regarding other people’s intellectual property.
Part of me feels disconnected from this whole argument. I would download a car. I don’t feel bad and I don’t think anyone should for feeling that way. Culture is free. If you didn’t want the world to know about it and use it you shouldn’t have shared your creation, knowledge, invention, or property with society by allowing them to legally acquire it. First sale doctrine and interoperability exceptions to copyright law are clear on this. If I buy a self-driving car, and get the title, it’s really, actually, legally my car now. If I can figure out how my car’s self-driving system works without violating any of the car vendor’s computers, that is my right to do so in order to adapt the car to my needs and desires. Provided I don’t interfere with or prevent the normal operation of the vendor’s computers this should be entirely legal. It is legal to modify the operation of the computers in the cars I own.
Writ large this means China will get their self-driving cars once the first people do because they will be in line buying them like everyone else. Then they will clone the tech just like everyone else. I don’t see what the big deal is besides all the money everyone feels they should be making and conversely all of the money to be saved by making your own system or cloning another. Like all displacement goods it will just take over the market and create a new one where self-driving is an implicit assumption of every car interaction and purchasing decision. It’s just so valuable a technology it won’t be possible to properly control it through traditional means if at all.
All of this is why I think the secret sauce of higher level self-driving to be a very real brass ring, that once snatched, will be hidden behind a velvet rope. It will be licensed and controlled remotely, not owned and operated by the end user and simply mediated by the car offline. I would expect future cars to have always online functionality to enable self-driving functionality checks simply for road safety reasons and also to deter IP leakage via encrypted firmware and remotely validated automatic updates. It will be interesting to see if any kind of open source challenger will appear in such a future. I hope we all get to see it sooner rather than later.
I see this come up on HN from time to time. How would you feel if a large company made millions of dollars on your open source project, and never gave anything back in return?
"Culture is free. If you didn’t want the world to know about it and use it you shouldn’t have shared your creation, knowledge, invention, or property with society by allowing them to legally acquire it."
This has very dangerous implications. If we have no intellectual property rights, large companies could just wait until small startups came out with a good idea..and it could be ripped off and copied. It only pushes us towards a world that's controlled by a couple of large corporations and governments.
"If I can figure out how my car’s self-driving system works without violating any of the car vendor’s computers, that is my right to do so in order to adapt the car to my needs and desires"
We aren't talking about reverse-engineering a car that you buy (which is legal). We are talking about an employee exfiltrating source code and other proprietary documents to be used at a competing company.
"Then they will clone the tech just like everyone else."
Sure, but who wants to be the first person to market and spend billions of dollars on R&D when you can just clone it after some other company does all of the hard work for you?
Another reason why we need IP laws is that innovation is actually stifled without them. China is a good example of this. I can't think of one thing innovative that came out of China in decades. Most are cheap (and many times worse) copies of technology from more innovative countries.
It reminds me of the current state of new drugs. The majority of new drugs are created in the US and are then cloned and sold for a much cheaper cost to countries with socialized medicine...mostly because they don't have to do any of the expensive R&D/clinical trials to get the drug to market.
"I would expect future cars to have always online functionality to enable self-driving functionality checks simply for road safety reasons and also to deter IP leakage via encrypted firmware and remotely validated automatic updates. It will be interesting to see if any kind of open source challenger will appear in such a future"
This is where most software has gone in the last decade (from download and install a copy to SAAS), so it makes sense.
More likely, China will simply steal Tesla's technology, share it with domestic manufacturers, and tell Tesla to swallow their medicine or leave the market, like they've done with every other foreign manufacturer that tried to dictate terms.
For tesla to continue rapidly developing new tech it needs cheap manual labor for production and large markets to sell in. If china floods the markets with cheap electric vehicles, tesla loses their markets, their economy of scale, their data collection etc.
China has been buttering up Tesla to make it easier to steal the technology by convincing then to move a huge portion of their manufacturing and process research into China.
But based on my talk with my friends in Shanghai Auto, and LandRover China (with Geely), the Chinese government pretty much are going to keep Tesla in China as the Catfish in the muddy water. The theory is to have a strong predator to force the weaker players to die and stronger to learn.
The government learned that the organizational structure inside Chinese domestic firms are not going to provide the soil for creative work.
Tesla is treated like a teacher, but they are not touched, as that defeat the whole purpose of having a strong predator in the market.
You might disagree, but I guarantee that Chinese government is not blind to where it needs to learn.
Have to be careful about saying anything novel or controversial about China and India in Silicon Valley focused forums.
But Maria doesn’t :)
When even Bloomberg acknowledges that the accusations are shaky you have to start questioning Tesla's narrative (literally, there's a section of TFA called a "Questionable Narrative"). Musk is known for being paranoid about "short-sellers", maybe the same could extend to "ip theft".
> Tesla is finally learning the lesson that all other companies doing business in China have already learned.
The events described involve engineers working in the US and the entire thing is being judicated in San Francisco. It has nothing to do with "doing business in China".
Stealing neural net would be even more pointless - it's mainly built for US roads, to run on specialised AI computer and control specialised hardware and can probably be extracted via firmware update anyway.
Plus Musk is always claiming to open source their patents and innovate so fast that their old software is irrelevant.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about self driving car industry.
There’s also much more to a neural net than just the training of it. Its methods and architecture can be re-applied to different situations, regardless of what a stop sign or roads look like.
In the same vein, iPhones use a different chipset than android phones but stealing Apple code and taking it to Google would still be of benefit.
It's clear that a self driving car will need to make use of a large suite of sensors which require tons of data processing. If Tesla is primarily camera based, it could be possible that they have invested in better cameras and better image processing algorithms + hw acceleration that competitors could learn from. Same goes for any serious player in this space.
It’s the necessary piping that gets all of these together that is probably the (major) long-tail of the problem and where most of the costs lay.
I just wonder, why do you comment then? If you by your self-assessment know nothing, you would just be adding to confusion around the topic, or in the best case scenario would randomly get some correct fact or intuition and thus increase confusion even more because some people would assume the rest is correct. Why not just comment on the things you know something about?
The car in at the top really doesn't look like any of Tesla's cars. Googling around for the model[1] and comparing it to Tesla's SUV[0] they really don't really have any similarities that any two random SUV's wouldn't have save for the glass roof. Just look at the entire back profile[0][1] and the fact that the G3 has a fairly prominent carbon fiber front grill[?] where as Tesla always made it a point to leave a blank spot where a grill would've gone in their cars.
[0] https://www.tesla.com/modelx
[1] https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-review/xpeng/g3/first-drives/x...
From the front it looks like a Tesla Model Y that was reproduced in balloon form—and then slightly overinflated.
The dashboard and driver display clearly too obvious liberties from the Tesla Model S, but that design is what... eight years old now? And the real value is in the software interaction design, not the coarse hardware alignment. Besides it's likely that Tesla will be doing a major refresh of the Model S/X interior within the next couple of years anyway, making the Xpeng look like a bad copy of a decidedly dated.
(I offer no opinion about IP theft.)
Could you provide an example of this "French car" that they copied? A google image search for "French SUV" doesn't turn up any cars that particularly resemble the G3. A search for "French electric vehicle" turns up with a bunch of Smart Car lookalikes. It's like whenever China is mentioned people turn into Markov chains and have to work the word copy into the rest of their sentence regardless of the reality.
Edit: You added a bit about the interior looking like a Model S's, which I agree with. Personally I believe touch screens in a car console should be illegal.
I was not accusing the design of being a clone of a specific existing design. I was accusing it of being hideous.