Tesla sues a former employee for stealing self-propelled technology and giving it to Xiaopeng Motors
The electric car manufacturer filed a lawsuit in the United States on Thursday, claiming that engineer Guangzhi Cao stole the key details from Tesla's self-propelled car project and took them to Xiaopeng Motors, a Chinese electric vehicle start-up. Elon Musk's company is seeking harm and stopping Cao from using the information.
After accepting a job at Xiaopeng, Cao deleted 1[ads1]20,000 files from the work computer and quit his iCloud account from it, the complaint said. He repeatedly logged into Tesla's network and cleared the browser log before leaving Tesla in early January.
Cao is now working at XMotors, Xiaopeng's US subsidiary.
Xiaopeng said in a statement that it has started an internal investigation, but is unaware of any alleged abuse of Cao, adding that it did not ask him "to misunderstand business secrets, confidential and proprietary information from Tesla."
"XMotors respect all third party intellectual property and confidential information," it said.
Cao could not be reached immediately for comments.
efforts to obtain American companies' tech secrets are a sensitive issue. This is one of the main reasons why the Trump administration launched a trade crisis with China last year.
The Tesla lawsuit is the second time in less than a year that any employee of Xiaopeng has been accused of stealing self-drive secrets from a large American tech firm.
In July, engineer Xiaolang Zhang was arrested and charged with stealing business secrets from Apple's self-propelled project. Xiaopeng said no Apple related information was transferred to the company and that Zhang had been dismissed. Zhang has not complained of guilty.
Foxconn ( HNHPF ) and Xiaomi. It started selling its first and only electric vehicle, XPeng G3, in China in December. The SUV includes a self-propelled function called X-Pilot. Tesla's self-propelled function is called Autopilot.
Tesla accuses the Chinese company of obvious theft and says in the complaint that it "has transparent mimic Tesla's design, technology and even its business model" and that XMotors currently employs at least five of Tesla's former Autopilot employees, including Cao .
"Tesla believes that Cao and his new employer, XMotors, will continue to have unmanned access to Tesla's marking technology, the product of more than five years of work and … hundreds of millions of investments that they have no legal right to own , "the complaint says.
