[natch]

But they did have an option. It was offered in 2014:

https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/09/tesla-wants-to-open-its-su...

The offer was backed up with a patent sharing offer:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

Tesla also made it clear that patent sharing while on the table was not necessarily a requirement, although there were other requirements for cost sharing:

https://www.engadget.com/2014-06-09-tesla-to-share-superchar...

This is in 2014. Nobody took Tesla up on the offer.

Of course, things are complex, and they had their reasons. One I suppose was Tesla started out with a pretty inflexible payment model that basically sold cars with charging for life (back then) with the cost bundled into the car price. This might have been a hangup for the bean counters at other companies. Letting bean counters run the show to the exclusion of giving a good charging experience is worthy of criticism, imho, but those other car companies are free to run their businesses as they see fit.

More recently, Tesla has made the payment options more flexible, and is moving NACS to be an actual standard, so the platform is getting easier to adopt, and here we are.

Edit: And thank you, I did learn a few things researching and writing this post.

[Veserv]

Have you actually read the Tesla "patent pledge" [1]? It is ridiculously unfair.

Tesla agrees to not sue you for patent infringement as long as you have not "asserted, helped others assert or had a financial stake in any assertion of (i) any patent or other intellectual property right against Tesla...".

Tesla will not assert patents if you agree to not assert any intellectual property right against Tesla which includes patents and copyright and trademark and possibly even trade secrets (I am not sure if trade secret misappropriation would normally be classified under intellectual property rights).

Tesla specifically reserves the right to assert patent rights if you "marketed or sold any knock-off product (e.g., a product created by imitating or copying the design or appearance of a Tesla product or which suggests an association with or endorsement by Tesla)" which explicitly carves out their copyright and trademark rights as protected while demanding you give up yours.

Tesla's "patent pledge" is about as honestly named as the USA PATRIOT Act. It exists purely as a bad-faith attempt to claim the moral high ground so they can blame others for hating cooperation when their terms are so utterly unfair that no sane person would ever willingly agree to them.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/legal/additional-resources#patent-pled...

[natch]

According to the Engadget article, Tesla PR (which did exist at that time) said "although the company is indeed offering to share its charging and adapter specifications with other manufacturers, on the conditions described above, this won't necessarily involve sharing patents."

Key excerpt: "Won't necessarily involve sharing patents."

Which might not cover your entire point about intellectual property (copyright, trademark). Also the article at time of writing suggested the details hadn't been finalized yet, so there's room for your side of the argument there as well.

I'll also grant that for some of this we have only Elon's spoken word, and we all know what that's worth... my main point was that I believe there were options for participation prior to 2023. Were there caveats? Of course.

[semiquaver]

Thanks for the link. I don’t agree that the statements you linked amount to a real option, since the offer seems to have been informal and quite encumbered compared with the alternative of using an actual standard. But it’s fair to say that the history is not as clear cut as I implied.

[natch]

I'd agree there's room for debate on the viability of the option. On my side I'd just say that it would be fair for Tesla to not give everything away as a total freebie... on the other hand perhaps manufacturers saw Tesla's offer as so odious as to be untenable. Or maybe they were just sincerely skeptical about Tesla's survival and plans. Hard to know without being privy to everything. But again I appreciated getting reminded of and learning some of the details.