From leadership to copying: why everyone in the auto industry is now taking everyone else (3 photos)
In the modern world, the concept of "trade secrets" is a thing of the past. Automotive manufacturing has become a global exchange of experience, where everyone learns from everyone else, and no one is shy about disassembling someone else's car down to the last bolt. 
At first, Chinese companies, especially BYD, spent years buying up ready-made technologies, designs, licenses, and even entire factories around the world. They invited European and Japanese engineers, studied Western electric vehicles at the molecular level, and in a matter of years went from copying to creating their own breakthrough solutions. Today, it's the Chinese who set the pace in the mass production of affordable electric cars.
And now the wheel has turned. Elon Musk mocked BYD in 2011, calling their cars ugly, but by 2025, BYD had overtaken Tesla in sales in China and Europe (17,000+ cars in October vs. Tesla's 8,000). So now Musk's company regularly buys the latest BYD, NIO, and Li Auto models, sending them off to be dismantled "down to the last screw" to study the competition. 
Former Tesla executive John McNeil openly stated that the main lesson learned from the Chinese was that everything hidden from the driver's view (motors, pumps, controllers) should be as unified and inexpensive as possible. Thanks to this approach, the Model 3 and Model Y share up to seventy-five percent of the same parts: essentially, only the body and interior are changed. 
That's how we live. Today's leader becomes tomorrow's student, and yesterday's student becomes the teacher. There are no more closed laboratories or sacred patents: as soon as a new car hits the market, competitors immediately buy it, dismantle it, and take the best parts. This is no longer espionage or theft—it's the standard practice of a global industry. Those who learn from each other's successes faster win. And in this honest, albeit brutal, exchange of knowledge, ever more advanced cars are born.
