The name Tuosule is a transliteration of Tesla in Cantonese Chinese, a dialect commonly spoken in Hong Kong. Â Tesla recently opened a showroom and a repair center in Hong Kong and is expecting to deliver its first car there next spring.
The California-based automaker is also building a flagship showroom located inside the Parkview Green hotel in Beijing. Â Scheduled to open before the end of the year, the showroom will be the world’s largest Tesla dealership and will spearhead the firm’s Chinese expansion. Â
Trademark Battle
Baosheng Zhan protected the Tesla name in 2006 for use on cars, planes and boats.  Tesla tried to buy the trademark for two million yuan (roughly $326,000) but Zhan reportedly asked for ten times that amount, a sum that Tesla was not willing to pay.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk initially planned on taking the matter to court but the legal battle would have been too lengthy and expensive. Â Apple fought a similar battle when it tried to launch its iPad tablet in China and ended up paying $60 million to buy the name from a firm that had used it once on a product several years prior. Â The lawsuit lasted two years. Â
The other trademark battle that Tesla was involved in ended relatively well as the Chinese swindler who had trademarked the name Tesla Motors a couple of years ago agreed to sell it for an unspecified amount of money last May. Â This didn’t solve the firm’s naming problem as the trademark only applied to rail vehicles, sleighs, planes and boats.
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