The company named after Nikola Tesla uses his 1888 AC induction motor as the direct ancestor of every motor in a Model S, Model 3, and Cybertruck. But the battery that powers those motors traces to two separate Nobel Prize–winning inventions: M. Stanley Whittingham's rechargeable lithium cell at Exxon (1977) and John Goodenough's lithium cobalt oxide cathode at Oxford (1980). The silicon solar cells on Tesla's Solar Roof descend from a Bell Labs invention in 1954. And the computing power behind Autopilot depends on NAND flash storage invented at Toshiba in 1985. Tesla didn't invent the electric vehicle from scratch — it took a century of foundational science and engineering, much of it done at universities and national labs with no commercial application in mind, and assembled it into something the market could finally accept. These are the patents that made Tesla possible.
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