Tesla’s Chinese rival Xpeng ‘stole’ Apple’s code, says Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s Tesla has a Chinese rival that calls itself Xpeng. Xpeng, the Chinese electric car maker has recently been all over the news, as per reports, for equipping its cars with LiDar sensors, which the Tesla CEO thought was “expensive” and “unnecessary”.

Following this, someone on Twitter mentioned that with Xpeng using LiDar tech, they were now moving away from copying Tesla’s strategy. Musk replied to this by stating that Xpeng have an older version of Tesla’s software and do not have their NN inference computer.

Another Twitter user asked if the Chinese company had a copy of Tesla’s old source code, Musk said yes and added something more. Musk responded to that tweet by adding that Xpeng had stolen Apple’s code too, referring to an incident that took place in 2018.

In 2018, an ex-Apple engineer was arrested and charged with stealing proprietary information that was related to Apple’s long-rumoured self- driving car project. The engineer who was arrested had started working for Apple in 2015 and was accused of downloading certain files related to engineering schematic and technical reports. He then quit Apple and started working for XMotors, the electric car company based in China.

Speaking of LiDar sensors, if you are confused by any chance - this is the tech Apple first put on its iPad Pros and then on the new iPhone 12 Pro and the iPhone 12 Pro Max. This tech, Light Detection and Ranging, helps iPads and iPhone cameras detect objects on the screen better for better photos and better AR.

Musk has explained that it’s not like he does not like LiDar sensors, he mentioned in another tweet that LiDar sensors are used by SpaceX, but he just does not think they are useful in Tesla cars.

“Just pointless imo for self-driving. If you’re going to do active photon generation, use an occlusion penetrating wavelength, like precision radar at ~4mm,” Musk tweeted.