Tesla Sues Zoox And Ex-Employees, Accuses Them Of Stealing Company Secrets

Tesla has filed a pair of lawsuits against self-driving startup Zoox and a number of former employees.

In one of the suits, filed with the US district court for Northern California, Tesla claims that four former employees, Scott Turner, Sydney Cooper, Christian Dement and Craigh Emigh, provided confidential information to Zoox. It is claimed that this info has allowed Zoox to accelerate the development of its autonomous technologies.

Turner previously worked as a manager at a Tesla distribution center and allegedly sent confidential documents about the automaker’s receiving and inventory procedures to his personal email address with the words “you sly dog you…” in the subject. He is also alleged to have sent “internal schematics and line drawings of the physical layouts of certain Tesla warehouses” to himself.

When Turner secured a position at Zoox, he is claimed to have recruited Cooper and Dement and also sent an additional four emails to himself with confidential documents under the subject ‘Good Stuff.’ Cooper is also accused of having sent confidential documents to Turner and Zoox before leaving Tesla.

The Verge reports that Emigh also mistakenly sent an email to Cooper’s old Tesla email address with a modified version of a proprietary Tesla document attached but altered to include the Zoox logo.

None of the four employees or Zoox itself have commented on the lawsuits, and Tesla has also declined to comment.

A separate lawsuit was filed by the Palo Alto automaker on Wednesday against Guangzhi Cao, a former member of Tesla’s Autopilot team. It is claimed that Cao uploaded complete copies of Autopilot-related source code to his iCloud account before leaving for Chinese startup Xpeng.