As of October 29, 2020, Toyota Motor was the largest owner of automobile patents. The company owned close to 20,000 active patent families in the technology field. The VW Group was the second largest owner with close to 15,000 active patent families. Toyota Motor has been the leading owner of automotive patent families since 2001, when it surpassed then former leader Nissan Motor. The statistic is based on data provided by PatentSight.
Largest automobile patent owners worldwide from 2000 to October 2020, by number of active patent families
* A patent family is defined as a group of patent documents all of which have the same set of priorities. I.e., it is a group of patent documents that protect the same invention across authorities.
PatentSight's Technology Clusters automatically categorize all patents in the database by an unsupervised machine learning algorithm based on patent text data and patent meta data. Considering text similarity, they offer a more application focused view on patents compared to IPC/CPC categorization. There are four levels available - each patent is assigned to only one cluster on each level (no co-assignments).
The Technology Cluster Automotive comprises patent families relating to or concerned with motor vehicles.
The owner of a patent includes all patents owned by a company and its subsidiaries (by at least 50%) based on comprehensive research on corporate structures, M&A, Spin-offs, company names changes, patent transactions. PatentSight also tracks former names of companies and subsidiaries, ongoing mergers and acquisitions, acquisitions of the past, reassignments, companies that have the same applicant, and transliterations by patent offices.
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LexisNexis PatentSight. (October 29, 2020). Largest automobile patent owners worldwide from 2000 to October 2020, by number of active patent families [Graph]. In Statista. Retrieved December 22, 2024, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1178041/worldwide-automotive-patent-owners-trend/
LexisNexis PatentSight. "Largest automobile patent owners worldwide from 2000 to October 2020, by number of active patent families." Chart. October 29, 2020. Statista. Accessed December 22, 2024. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1178041/worldwide-automotive-patent-owners-trend/
LexisNexis PatentSight. (2020). Largest automobile patent owners worldwide from 2000 to October 2020, by number of active patent families. Statista. Statista Inc.. Accessed: December 22, 2024. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1178041/worldwide-automotive-patent-owners-trend/
LexisNexis PatentSight. "Largest Automobile Patent Owners Worldwide from 2000 to October 2020, by Number of Active Patent Families." Statista, Statista Inc., 29 Oct 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1178041/worldwide-automotive-patent-owners-trend/
LexisNexis PatentSight, Largest automobile patent owners worldwide from 2000 to October 2020, by number of active patent families Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1178041/worldwide-automotive-patent-owners-trend/ (last visited December 22, 2024)
Largest automobile patent owners worldwide from 2000 to October 2020, by number of active patent families [Graph], LexisNexis PatentSight, October 29, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1178041/worldwide-automotive-patent-owners-trend/