Tesla to Apple: Help us nail thief who took robocar secrets to China start-up

SAN FRANCISCO - Tesla Inc. and Apple Inc. both suspect they were betrayed by driverless technology engineers who defected to the same Chinese startup. So Tesla is now asking for Apple's help in a lawsuit in which the electric carmaker accused an engineer who worked on its Autopilot program of taking thousands of highly confidential files when he went to work for XMotors.ai, the U.S. research arm of Guangzhou-based Xpeng. Along with typical information demands in the early fact-finding phase of the lawsuit that are spelled out in a court filing last week -- Tesla wants to see the engineer's emails and have a forensic analysis conducted on his electronic devices -- the company founded by Elon Musk disclosed that it has also served the iPhone maker with a subpoena. The documents Tesla seeks from Apple aren't specified in the filing, but the thinking may be that while the Silicon Valley titans are rivals in the ultra-hot self-driving space, they share a common enemy in Xpeng. Last July, prosecutors charged a hardware engineer in Apple's autonomous vehicle-development team with downloading proprietary files as he prepared to leave the company and start work for the for Chinese company.