Apple and Tesla employees allegedly tried to steal information to Xiaopeng Motors, a Chinese start-up electric car company. The Federal Bureau of Information charged a former employee of Apple of stealing trade secrets related to the company's self-driving car project while an employee of Tesla was charged for stealing autopilot related trade secrets.
Xiaopeng Motors, or XPeng, is a fast emerging EV startup in China. The company is unknown in the United States but its reputation in China is rapidly growing. The company is, currently, in the middle of two major trade secret scandals.
Micheal Dunne, who runs an automotive consulting firm ZoZo Go, said that in the last few decades, China was dependent mostly on state-owned automakers for its car industry but it all changed two to three years ago after the Chinese government encouraged its major tech investors to join the automotive space. Dunne added that it is a new and fresh dimension to China's auto industry and he sees Well-funded tech giants like Tencent and Alibaba as a potential answer to China's ambitions to build world-class vehicles.
XPeng was founded in 2014 by Henry Xia and Tao He as Guangzhou Xiaopeng Motors Technology. The company was financed by He Xiaopeng, a mobile internet entrepreneur. The company is known with its other names like Xiaopeng Motors, Xmotors but it is more popular with the name XPeng.
He Xiopeng is popular after selling UCWeb, a mobile browser company to Alibaba, a China-based e-commerce behemoth. Alibaba's purchased is labeled as the biggest internet merger in China's history at that time. Alibaba invested $350 million to XPeng, He Xiaopeng's next project after the purchase.
XPeng's first all-electric SUV car, called G3, first appeared at CES 2018. The car internal and external features are said to resemble Tesla's, Model X. The shape of the car is also criticized as a copycat of the Model X. The two cars also have the same layout for their cockpit which is both equipped with large portrait-oriented touchscreen tablet embedded in the dashboard.
He said during the interview with Quarts in 2018 that Tesla is one of the reasons that he founded XPeng since it has the company has open-sourced its patents in 2014. There are reports that the Chinese company disassembled a Tesla car to better understand its construction.
XPeng is not directly accused of stealing trade secrets. The FBI filed cases against Apple and Tesla employees and on the company itself.
