HONDA
Calling corporate espionage a threat to its competitive advantage in the all-terrain vehicle market, Honda of South Carolina is going to court to find out who posted unauthorized photos of its Talon side-by-side vehicles on the Internet...
...photos and detailed, confidential information about the Talon models started showing up on Internet sites hondasxs.com and HondaProKevin.com.
According
to Honda’s complaint, someone using the screen name “hondasecrets”
posted photos of Talons taken inside the factory. Another using the name
“HondaTalon” posted specifications “regarding the horsepower, maximum
speed, and measurements, which Honda had not yet released to the
public,” the complaint states. more
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TESLA
Tesla Inc. accused one of its former engineers of stealing highly confidential autopilot information before bolting to the Tesla of China, Xpeng Motors, eight months after one of Apple Inc.’s ex-employees was charged with taking sensitive robocar secrets to a new job with Xpeng.
Allegations that a second Silicon Valley giant (see below) was betrayed by one of its own workers bound for the same Chinese startup come amid a major U.S. crackdown on Chinese corporate espionage. more
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APPLE
A former hardware engineer (Zhang Xiaolang) for Apple’s autonomous vehicle development team who went to work for Xpeng is facing criminal charges brought by the U.S. Justice Department. He has pleaded not guilty...
Zhang told Apple he wanted to be closer to his ailing mother in China just before revealing to his supervisor that he intended to work for Xpeng. Apple grew more suspicious after seeing his increased network activity and visits to the office before he resigned, prosecutors said in a criminal complaint. He was arrested after he passed through the security checkpoint at Silicon Valley’s San Jose International Airport to board a flight to China. more
