Apple accused of poaching engineers from electric-car battery maker

A new lawsuit has been filed against Apple by an electric-car battery maker company named A123 Systems that accused Apple of poaching company’s top engineers to build its new battery division that competes directly with the firm. The lawsuit contacts documents which state that Apple was stalking and pursuing its top engineers that were also project lead engineers and that the company had to shut down some of its projects as the lead engineers left the company.
The main subject of the lawsuit is that Apple is building a battery division that resembles to the A123’s one. The suit also claims that Apple was also looking to snatch away battery engineers from other tech giants like LG, Samsung, Panasonic, Toshiba and more. Currently, it is said that a total of 11 engineers from A123 Systems are now working at Apple (according to their LinkedIn profiles) which gives a little credibility to the claims made by A123 Systems in the lawsuit.
Rumors have been circling around for over a week that Apple is planning to build an electric car to take on Tesla and other electric car manufacturers. Apple didn’t officially said that it’s true but considering some of the key individuals that Apple has hired over the past few months, including some engineers from Tesla too clearly shows that Apple is indeed working on building an electric car.
The lawsuit isn’t as threatening as it looks and it would not do much damage to Apple’s reputation but an interesting thing to note here is what Apple will do by manufacturing large lithium-ion batteries that could even power cars? Maybe an Apple iCar is in the works!