No coincidence! – The secret hunting between Toyota and Tesla began in 2010: Elon Musk noticed that he was manipulated by the person who “gave his hand and sat at the same table”. Toyota secretly launched a $ 13,000 electric SUV on the market and used it through the infected internal Tesla technology!
What once appeared as a revolutionary partnership between two giants of the automotive industry turned out to be the largest deception in e-mobility history-fifteen years later. According to insiders, the secret rivalry between Toyota and Tesla began much earlier than previously. As early as 2010, when Tesla was still an up-and-coming start-up and Toyota publicly invested in Elon Musk, a game of espionage and manipulation took place behind closed doors.
“I was manipulated by someone who shaked my hand and was sitting at the same table with me,” said Elon Musk recently in an interview with a Japanese tech magazine. Without name, the hint was clear: it was about the alliance between Tesla and Toyota at the time, in which the two companies worked together on the development of an electric vehicle. But what looked like a classic joint venture was obviously a camouflage for technological theft.
Documents that were recently released on platforms such as “Insider EV” show that Toyota already recruited employees from the Tesla environment from 2011 and had access to internal patents and software solutions that were never officially shared. Particularly explosive: A sketch of a tesla battery management system appeared almost identically in an internal development protocol from Toyota-dated 2012.
The latest scandal concerns a Toyota electric SUV model that has not yet been announced, which was presented in a closed investor meeting in Osaka. The vehicle should cost less than $ 13,000 in the production – a price that is far below the competition and was primarily made possible by “revolutionary thermal management systems”. It is precisely these systems that are strikingly similar to a Tesla prototype that never came onto the market but was already documented internally in 2014.
Although Toyota officially contests any misconduct, it is boiling in the technology world. Numerous votes are now calling for an independent examination – not only in the USA, but also in Japan. Musk himself showed that he “checked all legal options” to limit the damage to Tesla.
The actual scandal, however, not only lies in the alleged industrial espionage, but in the perfidious strategy: While Tesla was publicly courted as a partner, Toyota is said to have secretly driven a shadow development and have unscrupulously exploited confidential insights.
This unveiling not only throws a dark shadow on the image of the Japanese automotive giant, but also represents the question of trust in the entire tech industry. Elon Musk’s words sound like a wake -up call: “Sometimes the biggest enemy sits right next to you – and you only notice it when it’s too late.”
