Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the firm might distribute some of its automotive system coding to other car manufacturers. The open-source code offer was suggested during a live audio chat Twitter Spaces with Ford CEO Jim Farley on Thursday.
The online live event was held as part of a plan to announce a milestone agreement between Tesla and Ford.
The owner of the half-a-trillion dollar market valued car company said:
“In the same way that maybe Android is helpful to the phone industry as sort of a general standard, like we could potentially open source more code.”
The open source sharing means that the cars using the code will still belong to their respective companies, but some components inside the vehicles will belong to Tesla. The deal specifically means that Ford’s EV customers will get access to the Tesla Supercharging network in the U.S. and Canada.
Ford has also agreed to integrate Tesla’s charging port into its next generation of EVs. Ford plans to discard their existing charging system and replace it with Musk’s patented charging standard for Tesla so that the vehicles can connect to the charging stations without requiring an adaptor.
This puts Tesla in competition with Google, as the search-engine tech company also offers automakers Android Automotive OS which is modelled by their open-source mobile operating system that runs on Linux and is modified for use in cars. Apple also entered into the OS game last year when it announced its next-gen CarPlay instrument.
