Member-only story
From The Mobilist Inbox This Week
Blood feud, gigafactory chronology, useless batteries and new podcast
Each Wednesday, The Mobilist highlights reader articles on Medium, comments, and updates.
The South Korean battery blood feud: This week, I wrote about the coming deadline Saturday for President Biden to decide whether to side with LG Chem and stop SK Innovation from supplying lithium-ion batteries from a new plant in Georgia. The batteries would be for Ford’s coming electric F-150 pickup and VW’s SUV crossover ID.4. The International Trade Commission ruled that SKI stole trade secrets from LG in order to invent its battery, a position that SKI vehemently denies. Then last week, a separate ITC judge decided that SKI hadn’t violated LG patents. Do the different rulings possibly color any reading of the dispute? LG told me no — the cases are wholly different. But Sturgis Stobin, a lawyer for SKI, disagreed.
Stobin emailed me:
“We do believe it changes the narrative in a significant way because it demonstrates that 1) SKI’s technology is distinct from LG’s, and 2) when SKI was given a chance to defend itself on the merits of LG’s IP allegations, those allegations failed. We are asking [the U.S. Trade Representative] to disapprove the ITC remedies. If the trade secret claims are to be litigated in the U.S. (we think it should have been resolved…
