Electric car tycoons settle charging point legal battle

Ecotricity and Tesla end bitter dispute over motorway deal

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors (Getty)

Tesla, the electric car company set up by billionaire Elon Musk, and Britain’s wealthiest green energy tycoon have settled a bitter legal row over creating a UK-wide network of charging points for electric cars.

Dale Vince, the hippy turned wind farm millionaire, claims his Ecotricity business offered to help Tesla join its network of charging stations at motorway services.

Ecotricity said it made introductions between Tesla and the bosses of Britain’s biggest service station operators to discuss installing its chargers. But, Ecotricity claimed in its lawsuit, the Silicon Valley company then went “behind its back” and started negotiating directly with the service stations, inducing them to break their exclusive deals with Ecotricity.

Not only that, the lawsuit alleged, but Tesla used commercially secret information about Ecotricity covered by a non-disclosure agreement.

The settlement remains confidential, but it is thought to have included a multimillion-pound payment to Ecotricity. Neither side would comment on the deal, although Tesla said it would now be siting its chargers at motorway service stations without a business arrangement with Ecotricity.

Mr Vince has been no stranger to legal disputes lately. He hit the headlines just weeks ago over a bizarre demand for nearly £2m from the ex-wife he divorced when the pair were penniless new-age travellers more than two decades ago.

Mr Vince set up his “electric highway” of charging points in service stations across the country in 2011. He invested heavily in installing and supplying Ecotricity’s green electricity points in return for exclusive deals with Welcome Break, Roadchef and other chains.

Ecotricity says it introduced Tesla to the bosses of Roadchef and Welcome Break in March last year. But just two months later, according to the High Court claim, a Tesla manager in San Francisco accidentally forwarded an email chain to a senior Ecotricity Electric Highway executive revealing plans to blacken Ecotricity’s name as “monopolistic” and “the bad guy” with the British government.

According to Ecotricity’s filing, the email suggested that Tesla wanted to cut its own deals with the service stations, describing how the US firm would be “working with Welcome Break to identify limits to Ecotricity’s exclusivity in their bilateral contract”.

Tesla denied trying to coerce the service stations to break their deals with Ecotricity, and denied having broken its non-disclosure agreement. It claimed it had started planning a motorway network before meeting Mr Vince’s company.

In a counter claim, it also accused Ecotricity of wielding “super-dominant” power over the motorway service stations market, distorting competition with its “disproportionate” exclusivity arrangements. It claimed Ecotricity’s stranglehold was preventing rivals coming up with better technology such as Tesla’s Supercharger, which is now in use at 22 UK service stations.

Tesla declined to comment on the legal action but said: “We have only ever wanted to supplement existing charging infrastructure and offer more choice to consumers.”