Tesla adds new claims to old case against Rivian

Tesla is now claiming that their employees who had migrated to Rivian were “caught red-handed” stealing core technology for next-generation batteries from Tesla.

This is an expanded ongoing lawsuit that began last year when Tesla took Rivian to court for allegedly stealing trade secrets about poaching employees. A California state court judge in San Jose has now allowed Tesla to add its new allegations to the pending case.

According to a Bloomberg article, this lot of apparently poached employees are enabling Rivian the steal “the core technology for its next-generation batteries.” The motoring publication Motorbiscuit cites Peter Manoukian, California Superior Court Judge as saying: “Here, defendants contend that Tesla has not alleged plausible facts to support its contention that defendants acquired confidential battery information. That contention has some appeal to it.”

What is for certain is that this comes at a bad time for Rivian. In August just passed, Rivian filed its documents to go public and wants to carry out the IPO on its own and not, like many other eMobility companies, merge with an exchange shell.

Not only that but Tesla and Rivian are both working on electric pickup trucks, a very lucrative segment in the USA. The Tesla Cybertruck with its futuristic design is a different concept but will compete directly with the Rivian R1T. Both vehicles are scheduled to be launched in 2021, but just last month, Rivian beat Tesla to the starting blocks with its first production electric pick-up truck. As an indication of just how lucrative the electric pickup market is gearing up to be, last month, Ford began pre-series production of its F-150 electric pickup. A month before it was leaked that the company means to increase the production capacity for the F-150 Lightning to 80,000 units per year due to high demand, which Ford has now officially confirmed.

insideevs.com, electrek.co, motorbiscuit.com