Tesla CEO Elon Musk offers the company’s EV technology to Audi, others for a price

We recently covered Statement by Audi CEO Markus Duesmann that Audi was at least two years behind Tesla when it came to computing power in its GO and driverless car technology. Who admitted that publicly it is a big problem, but could generate some unlikely benefits.

You see, Tesla CEO Elon Musk saw Teslarati’s coverage of Duesmann’s statement and decided to offer assistance (more or less) to the other companies that are trying to catch up on Big T. Specifically, on Twitter on July 29 (because where else, really) He said Tesla would be willing to license its software and provide batteries and powertrains to other manufacturers.

Tesla is open to software licenses and the supply of power trains and batteries. We are just trying to accelerate sustainable energy, not crush competitors!

– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2020

That may sound quite generous, but in reality, it would be a murderous business situation for Tesla, as it would allow the company to do more of what is great: engineering, without having to increase capacity for actual car construction. It is also likely to be a great financial boost for the company.

Now, this type of thinking is not new to Tesla. The company has previously offered to open his Supercharger network to other manufacturers if they decided to pay a license fee. Now, since no one accepted Musk with that particular offer, we can only assume that the license fee was, shall we say, prohibitively expensive.

While it may be tempting to imagine a world where Audi E-Tron He had the guts of a Model X and retained all the Audi stuff that made it a nice place to hang out, the odds of that happening are probably not great. It doesn’t necessarily make much sense to the VW Group or GM or any other company that has heavily invested in EV technology just to put all that aside.

It makes perfect sense to any of the dozens of smaller EV startups, such as Future Faraday or Lucid, to raise Tesla’s leg (and the recurring hit to the baseline). In theory, this would allow such a company to come on the market with a more competitive product much sooner than would have been possible.

Even considering all of that, we wouldn’t hold our breath for any of that to happen.

Tesla did not immediately respond to Roadshow’s request for comment.