Griffith Hack Clean & Sustainable Technologies

To celebrate the launch of the new Toyota Prius (TM), we had another look at the patent landscape for hybrid vehicles. 

In a previous blog entry I discussed Toyota’s numerous patent portfolio for hybrid vehicles and the commercial advantage it gave Toyota.  In this blog entry I showed that there is more than 2,000 patent applications each year for electric and hybrid vehicles.

Griffith Hack (GH) decided to have a more focused look at Hybrid vehicles.  GH Searchers performed a key word search for patents filled across the globe relating to hybrid vehicles between 1994 and 2008.  GH located around 2,100 Toyota patents related to hybrid vehicles.
Below, we graph hybrid vehicle patent families by year.  A patent family is the collection of national patents covering a single invention.  Toyota, for example, has roughly between 2-3 patent applications for each family.   This graph shows that patent filing activity in this area is increasing roughly exponentially.  The numbers, particularly in recent years, are indicative of intense R&D activity and innovation in hybrid vehicles.  The various manufactures are attempting to crystallize their first-mover advantage by rapidly filing patent applications for their inventions. 

Hybrid vehicle patent filings per year

Interestingly, the ‘other’ category is the source of the majority of growth from 2006 onwards. However the biggest ‘other’ has only 10% of the filing rate of Toyota, the largest filer.  Also, they are quite late entrants in the market and are unlikely to be able to work their inventions without licences from the long term players such as Toyota, Nissan and Honda.  Thus, the ‘other’ category represents a group of patents fragmented over a multiplicity of late-entry entitles, and are weakly positioned to take advantage of their patent portfolio compared with the likes of Toyota.

Below, we graph hybrid Vehicle patents filed by manufacturer.  This graph shows the numbers of patents filed by the dominant players (I am told that Fuji is Subaru, but I can not confirm this).  Clearly, Toyota is the front runner, with Nissan, Honda and Subaru a distant 2nd-4th.  The other players have relatively small patent portfolios and are at a distinct commercial disadvantage because of this.  It is also clear that Toyota is the most innovative company in the field of Hybrid vehicles when patent counts are used as the relevant metric.

Hybrid vehicle patents applications by manufacturer

Toyota has been very aggressive in patenting it’s hybrid technology.  As can be seen, they are the dominant patent filer which indicates they are the key innovators and have the strongest commercial position in the marketplace.

It appears that other car makers are not beginning to close the gap with Toyota. Since 2006 there have been a large number of filings fragmented across a multiplicity of players.  None of these players have anything approaching the dominant position that Toyota has.  However, it appears that there are 13 entities that have over 100 patents each in the filed, which is quite remarkable.  There is intense interest by many entities to be part of the hybrid vehicle industry.

Justin Blows