US¡¯ largest EV maker Tesla is suing its electric car rival Rivian for stealing employees from the firm. The lawsuit also blamed Rivian for the theft of trade secrets by the company through these employees.
Images of court documents filed in the process of the lawsuit have been published by Electrek in a recent report. As per the documents, Tesla alleges that Rivian has recruited its employees in an attempt to steal trade secrets of Tesla.
In the lawsuit, Tesla mentions that it has seen ¡°an alarming pattern¡± among Tesla employees who left the firm and subsequently joined Rivian. Although, it does acknowledge that simply recruiting Tesla workers is ¡°legitimate competitive conduct.¡±
In the lawsuit, Tesla claims that ¡°Rivian instructed one recently departing Tesla employee about the types of Tesla confidential information that Rivian needs.¡± The company claims to have found three other employees taking ¡°highly valuable, confidential information as they left for Rivian.¡±
Tesla even shared a concern that more than a dozen of existing Rivian recruiters are former Tesla employees. These recruiters thus have a knowledge of the type of information that Tesla employees have access to.
Tesla claims that a total of 178 ex-employees of the company are now working with Rivian. As per Tesla, 70 of these joined Rivian directly from Tesla.
In a recent statement, Rivian has denied Tesla¡¯s claims, calling them ¡°baseless.¡± It said that it makes sure that ¡°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 the way things look at the present, we can expect another full blown trade secret war in the automotive technology space.
A similar trade war was earlier seen between Google's self-driving division Waymo and its ex-employee Anthony Levandowski, who was held responsible for trading Google¡¯s secrets with Uber Technologies. Levandowski was asked to pay $179 million to Google. Not so surprisingly, Levandowski filed for bankruptcy.