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All of Toyota’s electric vehicle patents are now royalty-free

464 points by e2e4 8y ago

azinman2 8y ago
I can’t tell what their motivation is... it cost a lot of money to file 24k patents to now just give away. Toyota isn’t exactly a charity or an “open source” company.
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  My guess is that it's a game theory move. No one wants to be making electric cars until everyone is making electric cars. Everyone wants to make electric cars, but no one wants to step out in front. Now that we're seeing Tesla succeed, I suspect the bit is being flipped, and a lot of companies are trying to convince each other that we should all jump into making electric cars now. Opening up patent libraries lowers the barriers for others. It's grabbing the hand of the kid next to you before you all jump off the dock together to go swimming. It doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the landscape, but it makes it easier to get started.
  - LifeLiverTransp 8y ago
    In addition - you defacto set the standard, without ever holding a single standardization meeting.
    - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
      Is there really an example that would prove that this ever happens? Aren't patents usually just clever ways of doing things, not necessarily decisions about the exact dimensions/contacts/voltages/etc. All other manufacturers could easily just take patents and make their own standards based on them?
      - nitrogen 8y ago
        Aren't patents usually just clever ways of doing things One would hope, but from reading Groklaw back in the day and HN now, it doesn't seem so.
      - Scoundreller 8y ago
        FireWire failed for its patents from Apple. Intel didn't want to develop around a port with a $1/port royalty. It took over another decade to move beyond 5V charging.
        solarkraft 8y ago
        Intel provided another great example of this recently: Thunderbolt 3 controllers used to cost quite a bit, so they weren't included in lower-cost devices. They saw that that didn't work out that well for them and made it royalty-free. Now it's basically the new USB standard.
        rrix2 8y ago
        > Now it's basically the new USB standard. Not even basically. It is USB 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#USB4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#USB4
  - clouddrover 8y ago
    > Everyone wants to make electric cars, but no one wants to step out in front. Volkswagen has already stepped out in front. VW is investing 80 billion euros in their electric car effort: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-electric-insight-idUSKCN1PV0K4 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-electric-insig... VW will be the biggest producer of electric cars in a few years. > a lot of companies are trying to convince each other that we should all jump into making electric cars now They need to make electric cars now to meet EU and Chinese emissions fleet emissions targets: http://fortune.com/2018/12/20/volkswagen-electric-cars-emissions/ http://fortune.com/2018/12/20/volkswagen-electric-cars-emiss... https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/vw-group-more-evs-carbon-neutral-2050/ https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/vw-group-more-evs-carbon-... In the future new car sales of ICE vehicles will be banned and ICE cars will be banned from some cities, in some places as soon as 2030: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-emissions-germany-idUSKCN1280G7 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-emissions-germany-i... https://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/15825/these-are-the-countries-that-plan-to-ban-non-electrified-vehicles https://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/15825/these-are-the-coun... http://fortune.com/2017/10/12/paris-combustion-engine-ban/ http://fortune.com/2017/10/12/paris-combustion-engine-ban/ If car companies want to stay in the car business they will have to produce battery electric cars or hydrogen fuel cell cars or both.
  - ianai 8y ago
    They’re probably making a kind of patent war firewall with this move. I’m not sure how it’d work, legally, but the clause about not paying royalties unless being engaged in lawsuits related to the tech is clearly strategic.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  I think the quote from the article is pretty telling: "If the number of electrified vehicles accelerates significantly in the next ten years, they will become standard, and we hope to play a role in supporting that process."
- astrowilliam 8y ago
  Barrier to entry has just been lowered drastically by open sourcing those patents. It's not about charity at all, it's about creating a market. By opening these patents to possible competitors, they are helping other companies enter the EV space. Toyota wants to dominate the EV vertical, but there needs to be more people buying them long-term for them to make a crap-ton of money. This is their way of helping create the market for the future.
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    I still don't quite see why I as a company would want to help a competitor enter the market on the same playing field as me. Is it so effective in increasing customer acceptance?
    - Zarath 8y ago
      It seems a little strange as well, but maybe it's something like this: I know I will dominate in an environment where EVs are popular, the only problem is, there isn't enough infrastructure for them to be popular yet. Therefore, I will facilitate an environment where they are popular?
      - ianai 8y ago
        It being a way to make standards is definitely possible. And the cost to using the standards is you can’t patent troll one another like apple/Samsung. It sounds like a kind of patent troll firewall. It’d probably be difficult for a troll to sue them for anything related to these patents.
    - peterwwillis 8y ago
      It's not exactly customer acceptance they're after. Cars are a market where there will always be some kind of competitor. Toyota knows it's one of the few great automakers in the world; they're not sweating that someone might out-Toyota them. But there needs to be advances in technology and manufacturing to lower the cost of EVs, so more people will buy them. Toyota could try to take the brunt of that gamble (assuming they even succeed), or it can open up its tech and let rivals try to build better tech, which they can then reverse-clone, like IBM making a clone of an IBM PC clone. Once the tech is more widespread and cheaper (and other people have paid for this to happen), they can swoop in and reap the benefits of an even larger share of people to whom they can sell cars.
- melling 8y ago
  “Toyota plans to make thousands of patents relating to its hybrid technology royalty-free, in a move analysts say will help keep the technology relevant by encouraging competitors to enter the market ” https://www.ft.com/content/3557f3da-55d7-11e9-91f9-b6515a54c5b1 https://www.ft.com/content/3557f3da-55d7-11e9-91f9-b6515a54c...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- rasz 8y ago
  Most are worthless. Toyota, just like Honda, bet on a short term hybrid horse, great during ~2008 oil price hike and cash for clunkers program, but ultimately a dead end.
  - rightbyte 8y ago
    At the time there were no battery production capacity for mass market EVs, so they bet on the only horse running the EV race which were small batteries and a gas tank.
- sb057 8y ago
  The real value in the 24,000 patents is not being sued by another company that patented it first.
- screye 8y ago
  It may force industry standards to organically align with Toyota design direction, allowing for easier compatibility. Also, if the industry follows your lead, you always stay in front.
- justin66 8y ago
  > I can’t tell what their motivation is... They're confident of two things: the move will encourage further players in the space, and they'll compete well against those players.
- guilhas 8y ago
  Other news sources point out "until 2030"
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dstick 8y ago
Definitely positive, regardless of motives. One number that jumped out was 23.740 patents in 20 years! That’s almost 23 patents every -week-. Is that normal for a company Toyota’s size? Do Apple, Samsung and others file the same amount in their fields?
- JoshTriplett 8y ago
  That's very much normal, especially for a manufacturing company. (A software company has copyright. For a manufacturing company, patents serve as the primary method for exclusivity on their designs.)
- rocgf 8y ago
  Surprisingly, or maybe not, IBM is the company that has been producing the largest amount of patents per year by a huge margin. In 2017 they managed to get around 9000, about 25 per day. I used to work at IBM and having your name on patents was one of the most important things in order to rise through the ranks. Past a point, you could not go higher without some significant activity in the patents realm. There were many patent groups, many talks about it, there was a 'patent score' that people had in their email signature etc. You were also rewarded financially for each one. In my humble opinion, this was a bunch of corporate bullshit. I've interacted with many people who had an impressive amount of patents and I was always disappointed. Their average patent was something along the lines of: a different way to use the browser history, a color-based way of handling support tickets, adding a list of blacklisted websites to a broswer or similar. It's hard to remember them because they were all unmemorable. Nothing was of substance or something worth being implemented.
  - dstick 8y ago
    Thanks for explaining. Mind boggling stuff... how can things like that even be patented? By those standards I could have filed a few myself ;-)
    - rocgf 8y ago
      > By those standards I could have filed a few myself ;-) You most definitely can, but you should remember that filing for a patent is very expensive. :) This was years ago, so I cannot remember all the details, but I did attend one or two patent workshops/talks, so I think can can weigh in on this. Basically, there are a few criteria for a certain submission to be patentable, the most important of which was novelty. There were some others, such as not simply combining exiting technologies to create something obvious (IIRC something called 'inventive step' or something like that), but largely it revolved around it being new. As you might imagine, the above is somewhat interpretable, so a lot of these could go through if they were a tiny bit novel in their approach. Even if your idea was not patented, your idea might still be published as a white paper just so that others could not then invent something similar. By exposing that idea to the outside world, it became public knowledge, so HP could not go and patent something similar. I remember being told it's all about the mindset. You don't have to be particularly bright or have some 'divine' spark, you just needed to take a problem/functionality/thing and turn it fiddle with it until you get something new, then do some research (there was special software for this) to see if it already exists, get someone internal to review it (a Master Inventor, as they were called), get in touch with the internal lawyers and send it for review.
aurizon 8y ago
I can see a small niche for hybrids, a small, constant speed engine coupled to a charger to get you past dead spots with no chargers, but the handwriting is on the wall for IC passenger vehicles, and possibly for long haul trucks. While it is true that gas/diesel has a higher energy per tank as well as a faster tank 'fill' time, this does not make up for the far higher cost per mile for the liquid fuels, AND the complexity of thousands of small parts threshing and wearing away. Electric motors are routinely made to run for 100,000 hours and upwards, because they have rotary bearings and only torque to contend with versus the 2500 rpm of IC engines with bearing impact bangs of the IC engine many times per revolution, and the timing belts, and the tappets hammering and the valves burning away, and the muffler and pollution control gizmos rotting and crumbling away. And brakes, with regenerative braking (which wears nothing) we have already seen brake linings on Teslas and others hit 500,000 miles - more? I can see an era of polyurethane(PU) tires also good for 500,000 miles. They cost more, but they run more and are a lot tougher against road damage than rubber. Sure, any fool can burn rubber and jam on the brakes and, in effect, burn $$ to kill them faster, but I am betting that regen braking as well as more AI in the control box that has the potential to avoid almost all friction based braking, because that AI knows your route (mostly - from experience), when to slow with regen for the turns and curves. The moving hand writes, pauses, points it's thumbs down, and moves on. IC engines are in a downwards race to nowhere. It looks like there is no lithium shortage at all. Cobalt looks like a scarcer element, which adds cost, but electrode design is improving almost monthly and less cobalt is needed. In addition, cobalt is a recyclable material and this will soon be almost 100% captured for re-use, as the growing shortage drives the reward for recycling it.
- vvanders 8y ago
  As someone who owns a long range EV I don't see trucking/towing going away soonish. Even towing marginal 6-8k loads we see ~11mpg in our efficient truck(v6 turbodiesel). The energy density just isn't there for 100mi+ trips. That said I'd kill for a diesel electric truck, love the torque and smoothness of our EV.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Tesla’s new Raven motors and a more energy dense pack based off the 2170 cells in the Model 3 make this use case within reach. Their Semi is dragging a 80k tractor trailer load (concrete blocks) around to demonstrate the high end working. Disclaimer: I occasionally tow ~2500lbs with my Model S. Works very well, no Auotpilot though while towing.
natch 8y ago
This is great news to the extent that it includes tech for fully electric vehicles (as opposed to "electrified", a red flag word that includes hybrids as if they were on the same footing as electric cars). The "green" halo bestowed on hybrids is really no longer justified. They still burn gasoline, pollute almost as much as any other car, and have ultra complex maintenance like any ICE car. I hope this isn't just a feint to encourage competitors to get mired in hybrid tech... although in that case the silver lining would be Toyota trying to take a leading position in fully electric. Regardless of any possible cynical interpretations, it does seem like a hugely positive move overall. Since renewables are now price competitive with dirty options like coal, more and more of the grid will flip over to clean energy, so all-electric vehicles are going to have a huge impact on cutting CO2 emissions.
- clouddrover 8y ago
  > The "green" halo bestowed on hybrids is really no longer justified. They still burn gasoline, pollute almost as much as any other car The Toyota Prius does better than many other cars in environmental impact: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1117018_2018-toyota-prius-prime-tesla-model-3-take-awards-for-lowest-environmental-and-social-impact https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1117018_2018-toyota-pri... > and have ultra complex maintenance like any ICE car. The Toyota Prius is reckoned to be one of the cheapest cars to own and maintain: https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/02/most-and-least-expensive-cars-to-own/index.htm https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/02/most-and-le... https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/the-most-and-least-expensive-cars-to-maintain-by-maddy-martin https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/the-most-and-least-expe... The maintenance and reliability just doesn't seem to be a problem with the Prius.
- webninja 8y ago
  > Hybrids ... pollute almost as much as any other car. That’s just factually and obviously untrue. You can tell by looking at the MPG figure. Any vehicle that burns more gallons of gas per mile proportionally farts out more emissions per mile. My 2013 Toyota Camry hybrid is 6 years old now, gets 38-41mpg, and I have never charged it. It is a rock solid vehicle and I have never had to perform maintenance on any of the hybrid parts. They just work. Toyota has a reputation for producing low maintenance vehicles using last year’s technology. If the battery eventually wears out later on and I don’t fix it, it’ll get less MPG and be more like every other carbon farting car on the road. Believe it or not, the car produces more electricity from regenerative braking than it uses up so the battery is usually mostly full all the time. The bottle-neck is in the electric motor’s low top-speed. It switches from electric to gas if you ever go over 40mph and back to electric if you go under 40mph. There isn’t a big need to be so cynical with hybrids. They’re quite amazing and incredible to watch and use.
seltzered_ 8y ago
Someone has to read the actual legal verbage. For example, to quote https://twitter.com/Tweetermeyer/status/1092570451329441792 https://twitter.com/Tweetermeyer/status/1092570451329441792 on Tesla's free patents - "A common belief is that anyone using Tesla's patents has to give Tesla access to its patents, but that's not quite accurate. To meet Tesla's "good faith" standard, you can't have asserted an EV-related patent or IP right against ANYONE." Start with the actual press release: https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/27512455.html https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/27512455.html which links to: https://toyota.jp/cmpn/gp/ma/dc/electrification-technologies_en https://toyota.jp/cmpn/gp/ma/dc/electrification-technologies... - whose title is "Inquiry regarding royalty-free availability of electrification technologies up to 2030"
- sweden 8y ago
  So in order to take advantage of Tesla patents, you can't be suing anyone else on EV-related patents of your own? That actually sounds like an interesting and positive side-effect, or am I missing something here?
  - seltzered_ 8y ago
    I'm not familiar enough with the automotive industry to know. To make some rough strawman examples: If a smaller/startup company gives away patents under a "good-faith" condition, it may at best help other startups try to come up to develop the market - perhaps that was Tesla's intent at the time. If a larger company does this, I'm a bit more confused on intent - perhaps it might be seen as an 'option' in addition to traditional licensing. Where one can either pay for a license or optionally get a free license in exchange for not asserting patent rights against the larger company later on. I've seen cases where a smaller company may exert patent rights on something seemingly obvious on the industry (they filed the patent, and some judge in Marshall, Texas enforced it), and ends up becoming a method of sharing patent rights with other companies in the industry (e.g. smaller company exerts patent rights, larger company discovers smaller company is infringing on their patents, lawyers end up sitting down and negotiating some license for license agreement). This may be changing a bit with the changes in how patent holders choose courts (see https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-05-25/the-texas-town-that-patent-trolls-built-j34rlmjc https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-05-25/the-te... )
heisenbit 8y ago
This is a very clever move by Toyota. They are the leader in hybrid and that market segment is very small. Growing that segment by 100% or even 1000% may be possible and most of the growth will accrue with them. Certainly most of the profits as they are already positioned to deliver the most performant, economic and even more importantly trusted solution.
lawrenceyan 8y ago
Is this like how Tesla “open-sourced their patents” too?
samstave 8y ago
ELI5: You can use these patents, ostensibly, as it pertains to a design of [thing] that youre making. However, could you use the actual componentry coming out of a tesla facility as patented and incorporate it into your [thing]: I.e. design a car completely designed to comply with the patenet and design of the tesla sub chassis such that you can modify a 38 Ford to be placed on top of a tesla drive train system? The reason i ask this is that i had a former boss at this architect firm where he did just this, but instead purchased a corvette Z series car which was “totalled” (fiberglass body was destroyed in a roll) three days after purchase and put a 38 ford body on top of the chassis that needed minimal repairs. So now he had a ford on top of the latest corvette model avail at the time. Id like to do this with teslas...
- perl4ever 8y ago
  There are quite a few people taking old cars such as Porsches and electrifying them. I think they may be using some Tesla parts. I would like to take an old car and install a small battery, a small engine, and a big electric motor. Because if you are all engine you need a big thirsty engine, and if you are all battery you need a big heavy battery, but if you just need power for say 10 seconds of acceleration, you can have a small battery, and if you just need a big enough engine for the average power usage, you can have a very small engine, and if you have a powerful electric motor, you can still accelerate quickly.
  - gridspy 8y ago
    Just bear in mind that large batteries have a couple more advantages 1. More battery banks so each one has to deliver less power during acceleration 2. More space to distribute any waste heat 3. Less waste heat for a given current since we have less current per battery system So, a small battery bank might not deliver the current you need for your burst of acceleration.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      Small is a relative term; the comparison is to a battery that provides a couple hundred miles of range, as people are trying for these days.
lr 8y ago
This is the real "sharing economy"! The planet is not going to be survivable for humans and many other species if we don't start cooperating. If that means one has to give up enforcing their own patents in order to take advantage of these from Toyota, then so be it. We love Star Trek, where the "...economics of the future are somewhat different..." where "...we work to better ourselves, and the rest of humanity..." So maybe this is the actual true beginning of cooperation that will make our collective future possible...
- megy 8y ago
  Building more cars is not going to be anyone survive. We need to get away from individual transport.
  - dotancohen 8y ago
    Though that may be true from a sustainability standpoint, that is not the future that I want my children to live in. A future where everyone must like (go to) the same parks, everyone must go to the same shops, everyone must go to the workplace accessible from their home or live in the home accessible from their workplace. Individualism is gravely important to humans. Getting away from individual transport is relinquishing all hope of individual determinism.
    - abyssin 8y ago
      How about your children breathing the same air as everyone else and sharing the same planet? Cars are a small exception in the way human have been moving around.
woodandsteel 8y ago
I think this is a desperation move on Toyota's part. Hybrids were a hot technology a decade ago, but they are being replaced by battery electrics. And I am guessing that Toyota's management is finally realizing that its huge bet on hydrogen fuel cells is never going to pay off. It's interesting to contrast this with the other top car manufacturer, VW. It has decided to push hard on EV's.
williesleg 8y ago
Elon is the master of the Electric domain. No wonder he's sold more Model 3's than any other luxury class sedan in the US. In fact, he sold more in the first QUARTER this year than any luxury car did ALL YEAR last year.

464 points by e2e4 8y ago

I can’t tell what their motivation is... it cost a lot of money to file 24k patents to now just give away. Toyota isn’t exactly a charity or an “open source” company.

Pfhreak 8y ago
My guess is that it's a game theory move. No one wants to be making electric cars until everyone is making electric cars. Everyone wants to make electric cars, but no one wants to step out in front. Now that we're seeing Tesla succeed, I suspect the bit is being flipped, and a lot of companies are trying to convince each other that we should all jump into making electric cars now. Opening up patent libraries lowers the barriers for others. It's grabbing the hand of the kid next to you before you all jump off the dock together to go swimming. It doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the landscape, but it makes it easier to get started.
- LifeLiverTransp 8y ago
  In addition - you defacto set the standard, without ever holding a single standardization meeting.
  - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
    Is there really an example that would prove that this ever happens? Aren't patents usually just clever ways of doing things, not necessarily decisions about the exact dimensions/contacts/voltages/etc. All other manufacturers could easily just take patents and make their own standards based on them?
    - nitrogen 8y ago
      Aren't patents usually just clever ways of doing things One would hope, but from reading Groklaw back in the day and HN now, it doesn't seem so.
    - Scoundreller 8y ago
      FireWire failed for its patents from Apple. Intel didn't want to develop around a port with a $1/port royalty. It took over another decade to move beyond 5V charging.
      - solarkraft 8y ago
        Intel provided another great example of this recently: Thunderbolt 3 controllers used to cost quite a bit, so they weren't included in lower-cost devices. They saw that that didn't work out that well for them and made it royalty-free. Now it's basically the new USB standard.
        rrix2 8y ago
        > Now it's basically the new USB standard. Not even basically. It is USB 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#USB4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#USB4
- clouddrover 8y ago
  > Everyone wants to make electric cars, but no one wants to step out in front. Volkswagen has already stepped out in front. VW is investing 80 billion euros in their electric car effort: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-electric-insight-idUSKCN1PV0K4 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-electric-insig... VW will be the biggest producer of electric cars in a few years. > a lot of companies are trying to convince each other that we should all jump into making electric cars now They need to make electric cars now to meet EU and Chinese emissions fleet emissions targets: http://fortune.com/2018/12/20/volkswagen-electric-cars-emissions/ http://fortune.com/2018/12/20/volkswagen-electric-cars-emiss... https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/vw-group-more-evs-carbon-neutral-2050/ https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/vw-group-more-evs-carbon-... In the future new car sales of ICE vehicles will be banned and ICE cars will be banned from some cities, in some places as soon as 2030: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-emissions-germany-idUSKCN1280G7 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-emissions-germany-i... https://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/15825/these-are-the-countries-that-plan-to-ban-non-electrified-vehicles https://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/15825/these-are-the-coun... http://fortune.com/2017/10/12/paris-combustion-engine-ban/ http://fortune.com/2017/10/12/paris-combustion-engine-ban/ If car companies want to stay in the car business they will have to produce battery electric cars or hydrogen fuel cell cars or both.
- ianai 8y ago
  They’re probably making a kind of patent war firewall with this move. I’m not sure how it’d work, legally, but the clause about not paying royalties unless being engaged in lawsuits related to the tech is clearly strategic.
hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
I think the quote from the article is pretty telling: "If the number of electrified vehicles accelerates significantly in the next ten years, they will become standard, and we hope to play a role in supporting that process."
astrowilliam 8y ago
Barrier to entry has just been lowered drastically by open sourcing those patents. It's not about charity at all, it's about creating a market. By opening these patents to possible competitors, they are helping other companies enter the EV space. Toyota wants to dominate the EV vertical, but there needs to be more people buying them long-term for them to make a crap-ton of money. This is their way of helping create the market for the future.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  I still don't quite see why I as a company would want to help a competitor enter the market on the same playing field as me. Is it so effective in increasing customer acceptance?
  - Zarath 8y ago
    It seems a little strange as well, but maybe it's something like this: I know I will dominate in an environment where EVs are popular, the only problem is, there isn't enough infrastructure for them to be popular yet. Therefore, I will facilitate an environment where they are popular?
    - ianai 8y ago
      It being a way to make standards is definitely possible. And the cost to using the standards is you can’t patent troll one another like apple/Samsung. It sounds like a kind of patent troll firewall. It’d probably be difficult for a troll to sue them for anything related to these patents.
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    It's not exactly customer acceptance they're after. Cars are a market where there will always be some kind of competitor. Toyota knows it's one of the few great automakers in the world; they're not sweating that someone might out-Toyota them. But there needs to be advances in technology and manufacturing to lower the cost of EVs, so more people will buy them. Toyota could try to take the brunt of that gamble (assuming they even succeed), or it can open up its tech and let rivals try to build better tech, which they can then reverse-clone, like IBM making a clone of an IBM PC clone. Once the tech is more widespread and cheaper (and other people have paid for this to happen), they can swoop in and reap the benefits of an even larger share of people to whom they can sell cars.
melling 8y ago
“Toyota plans to make thousands of patents relating to its hybrid technology royalty-free, in a move analysts say will help keep the technology relevant by encouraging competitors to enter the market ” https://www.ft.com/content/3557f3da-55d7-11e9-91f9-b6515a54c5b1 https://www.ft.com/content/3557f3da-55d7-11e9-91f9-b6515a54c...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rasz 8y ago
Most are worthless. Toyota, just like Honda, bet on a short term hybrid horse, great during ~2008 oil price hike and cash for clunkers program, but ultimately a dead end.
- rightbyte 8y ago
  At the time there were no battery production capacity for mass market EVs, so they bet on the only horse running the EV race which were small batteries and a gas tank.
sb057 8y ago
The real value in the 24,000 patents is not being sued by another company that patented it first.
screye 8y ago
It may force industry standards to organically align with Toyota design direction, allowing for easier compatibility. Also, if the industry follows your lead, you always stay in front.
justin66 8y ago
> I can’t tell what their motivation is... They're confident of two things: the move will encourage further players in the space, and they'll compete well against those players.
guilhas 8y ago
Other news sources point out "until 2030"

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

dstick 8y ago

Definitely positive, regardless of motives. One number that jumped out was 23.740 patents in 20 years! That’s almost 23 patents every -week-. Is that normal for a company Toyota’s size? Do Apple, Samsung and others file the same amount in their fields?

JoshTriplett 8y ago
That's very much normal, especially for a manufacturing company. (A software company has copyright. For a manufacturing company, patents serve as the primary method for exclusivity on their designs.)
rocgf 8y ago
Surprisingly, or maybe not, IBM is the company that has been producing the largest amount of patents per year by a huge margin. In 2017 they managed to get around 9000, about 25 per day. I used to work at IBM and having your name on patents was one of the most important things in order to rise through the ranks. Past a point, you could not go higher without some significant activity in the patents realm. There were many patent groups, many talks about it, there was a 'patent score' that people had in their email signature etc. You were also rewarded financially for each one. In my humble opinion, this was a bunch of corporate bullshit. I've interacted with many people who had an impressive amount of patents and I was always disappointed. Their average patent was something along the lines of: a different way to use the browser history, a color-based way of handling support tickets, adding a list of blacklisted websites to a broswer or similar. It's hard to remember them because they were all unmemorable. Nothing was of substance or something worth being implemented.
- dstick 8y ago
  Thanks for explaining. Mind boggling stuff... how can things like that even be patented? By those standards I could have filed a few myself ;-)
  - rocgf 8y ago
    > By those standards I could have filed a few myself ;-) You most definitely can, but you should remember that filing for a patent is very expensive. :) This was years ago, so I cannot remember all the details, but I did attend one or two patent workshops/talks, so I think can can weigh in on this. Basically, there are a few criteria for a certain submission to be patentable, the most important of which was novelty. There were some others, such as not simply combining exiting technologies to create something obvious (IIRC something called 'inventive step' or something like that), but largely it revolved around it being new. As you might imagine, the above is somewhat interpretable, so a lot of these could go through if they were a tiny bit novel in their approach. Even if your idea was not patented, your idea might still be published as a white paper just so that others could not then invent something similar. By exposing that idea to the outside world, it became public knowledge, so HP could not go and patent something similar. I remember being told it's all about the mindset. You don't have to be particularly bright or have some 'divine' spark, you just needed to take a problem/functionality/thing and turn it fiddle with it until you get something new, then do some research (there was special software for this) to see if it already exists, get someone internal to review it (a Master Inventor, as they were called), get in touch with the internal lawyers and send it for review.

aurizon 8y ago

I can see a small niche for hybrids, a small, constant speed engine coupled to a charger to get you past dead spots with no chargers, but the handwriting is on the wall for IC passenger vehicles, and possibly for long haul trucks. While it is true that gas/diesel has a higher energy per tank as well as a faster tank 'fill' time, this does not make up for the far higher cost per mile for the liquid fuels, AND the complexity of thousands of small parts threshing and wearing away. Electric motors are routinely made to run for 100,000 hours and upwards, because they have rotary bearings and only torque to contend with versus the 2500 rpm of IC engines with bearing impact bangs of the IC engine many times per revolution, and the timing belts, and the tappets hammering and the valves burning away, and the muffler and pollution control gizmos rotting and crumbling away. And brakes, with regenerative braking (which wears nothing) we have already seen brake linings on Teslas and others hit 500,000 miles - more? I can see an era of polyurethane(PU) tires also good for 500,000 miles. They cost more, but they run more and are a lot tougher against road damage than rubber. Sure, any fool can burn rubber and jam on the brakes and, in effect, burn $$ to kill them faster, but I am betting that regen braking as well as more AI in the control box that has the potential to avoid almost all friction based braking, because that AI knows your route (mostly - from experience), when to slow with regen for the turns and curves. The moving hand writes, pauses, points it's thumbs down, and moves on. IC engines are in a downwards race to nowhere. It looks like there is no lithium shortage at all. Cobalt looks like a scarcer element, which adds cost, but electrode design is improving almost monthly and less cobalt is needed. In addition, cobalt is a recyclable material and this will soon be almost 100% captured for re-use, as the growing shortage drives the reward for recycling it.

vvanders 8y ago
As someone who owns a long range EV I don't see trucking/towing going away soonish. Even towing marginal 6-8k loads we see ~11mpg in our efficient truck(v6 turbodiesel). The energy density just isn't there for 100mi+ trips. That said I'd kill for a diesel electric truck, love the torque and smoothness of our EV.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Tesla’s new Raven motors and a more energy dense pack based off the 2170 cells in the Model 3 make this use case within reach. Their Semi is dragging a 80k tractor trailer load (concrete blocks) around to demonstrate the high end working. Disclaimer: I occasionally tow ~2500lbs with my Model S. Works very well, no Auotpilot though while towing.

natch 8y ago

This is great news to the extent that it includes tech for fully electric vehicles (as opposed to "electrified", a red flag word that includes hybrids as if they were on the same footing as electric cars). The "green" halo bestowed on hybrids is really no longer justified. They still burn gasoline, pollute almost as much as any other car, and have ultra complex maintenance like any ICE car. I hope this isn't just a feint to encourage competitors to get mired in hybrid tech... although in that case the silver lining would be Toyota trying to take a leading position in fully electric. Regardless of any possible cynical interpretations, it does seem like a hugely positive move overall. Since renewables are now price competitive with dirty options like coal, more and more of the grid will flip over to clean energy, so all-electric vehicles are going to have a huge impact on cutting CO2 emissions.

clouddrover 8y ago
> The "green" halo bestowed on hybrids is really no longer justified. They still burn gasoline, pollute almost as much as any other car The Toyota Prius does better than many other cars in environmental impact: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1117018_2018-toyota-prius-prime-tesla-model-3-take-awards-for-lowest-environmental-and-social-impact https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1117018_2018-toyota-pri... > and have ultra complex maintenance like any ICE car. The Toyota Prius is reckoned to be one of the cheapest cars to own and maintain: https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/02/most-and-least-expensive-cars-to-own/index.htm https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2013/02/most-and-le... https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/the-most-and-least-expensive-cars-to-maintain-by-maddy-martin https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/the-most-and-least-expe... The maintenance and reliability just doesn't seem to be a problem with the Prius.
webninja 8y ago
> Hybrids ... pollute almost as much as any other car. That’s just factually and obviously untrue. You can tell by looking at the MPG figure. Any vehicle that burns more gallons of gas per mile proportionally farts out more emissions per mile. My 2013 Toyota Camry hybrid is 6 years old now, gets 38-41mpg, and I have never charged it. It is a rock solid vehicle and I have never had to perform maintenance on any of the hybrid parts. They just work. Toyota has a reputation for producing low maintenance vehicles using last year’s technology. If the battery eventually wears out later on and I don’t fix it, it’ll get less MPG and be more like every other carbon farting car on the road. Believe it or not, the car produces more electricity from regenerative braking than it uses up so the battery is usually mostly full all the time. The bottle-neck is in the electric motor’s low top-speed. It switches from electric to gas if you ever go over 40mph and back to electric if you go under 40mph. There isn’t a big need to be so cynical with hybrids. They’re quite amazing and incredible to watch and use.

seltzered_ 8y ago

Someone has to read the actual legal verbage. For example, to quote https://twitter.com/Tweetermeyer/status/1092570451329441792 https://twitter.com/Tweetermeyer/status/1092570451329441792 on Tesla's free patents - "A common belief is that anyone using Tesla's patents has to give Tesla access to its patents, but that's not quite accurate. To meet Tesla's "good faith" standard, you can't have asserted an EV-related patent or IP right against ANYONE." Start with the actual press release: https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/27512455.html https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/27512455.html which links to: https://toyota.jp/cmpn/gp/ma/dc/electrification-technologies_en https://toyota.jp/cmpn/gp/ma/dc/electrification-technologies... - whose title is "Inquiry regarding royalty-free availability of electrification technologies up to 2030"

sweden 8y ago
So in order to take advantage of Tesla patents, you can't be suing anyone else on EV-related patents of your own? That actually sounds like an interesting and positive side-effect, or am I missing something here?
- seltzered_ 8y ago
  I'm not familiar enough with the automotive industry to know. To make some rough strawman examples: If a smaller/startup company gives away patents under a "good-faith" condition, it may at best help other startups try to come up to develop the market - perhaps that was Tesla's intent at the time. If a larger company does this, I'm a bit more confused on intent - perhaps it might be seen as an 'option' in addition to traditional licensing. Where one can either pay for a license or optionally get a free license in exchange for not asserting patent rights against the larger company later on. I've seen cases where a smaller company may exert patent rights on something seemingly obvious on the industry (they filed the patent, and some judge in Marshall, Texas enforced it), and ends up becoming a method of sharing patent rights with other companies in the industry (e.g. smaller company exerts patent rights, larger company discovers smaller company is infringing on their patents, lawyers end up sitting down and negotiating some license for license agreement). This may be changing a bit with the changes in how patent holders choose courts (see https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-05-25/the-texas-town-that-patent-trolls-built-j34rlmjc https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-05-25/the-te... )

heisenbit 8y ago

This is a very clever move by Toyota. They are the leader in hybrid and that market segment is very small. Growing that segment by 100% or even 1000% may be possible and most of the growth will accrue with them. Certainly most of the profits as they are already positioned to deliver the most performant, economic and even more importantly trusted solution.

lawrenceyan 8y ago

Is this like how Tesla “open-sourced their patents” too?

samstave 8y ago

ELI5: You can use these patents, ostensibly, as it pertains to a design of [thing] that youre making. However, could you use the actual componentry coming out of a tesla facility as patented and incorporate it into your [thing]: I.e. design a car completely designed to comply with the patenet and design of the tesla sub chassis such that you can modify a 38 Ford to be placed on top of a tesla drive train system? The reason i ask this is that i had a former boss at this architect firm where he did just this, but instead purchased a corvette Z series car which was “totalled” (fiberglass body was destroyed in a roll) three days after purchase and put a 38 ford body on top of the chassis that needed minimal repairs. So now he had a ford on top of the latest corvette model avail at the time. Id like to do this with teslas...

perl4ever 8y ago
There are quite a few people taking old cars such as Porsches and electrifying them. I think they may be using some Tesla parts. I would like to take an old car and install a small battery, a small engine, and a big electric motor. Because if you are all engine you need a big thirsty engine, and if you are all battery you need a big heavy battery, but if you just need power for say 10 seconds of acceleration, you can have a small battery, and if you just need a big enough engine for the average power usage, you can have a very small engine, and if you have a powerful electric motor, you can still accelerate quickly.
- gridspy 8y ago
  Just bear in mind that large batteries have a couple more advantages 1. More battery banks so each one has to deliver less power during acceleration 2. More space to distribute any waste heat 3. Less waste heat for a given current since we have less current per battery system So, a small battery bank might not deliver the current you need for your burst of acceleration.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    Small is a relative term; the comparison is to a battery that provides a couple hundred miles of range, as people are trying for these days.

lr 8y ago

This is the real "sharing economy"! The planet is not going to be survivable for humans and many other species if we don't start cooperating. If that means one has to give up enforcing their own patents in order to take advantage of these from Toyota, then so be it. We love Star Trek, where the "...economics of the future are somewhat different..." where "...we work to better ourselves, and the rest of humanity..." So maybe this is the actual true beginning of cooperation that will make our collective future possible...

megy 8y ago
Building more cars is not going to be anyone survive. We need to get away from individual transport.
- dotancohen 8y ago
  Though that may be true from a sustainability standpoint, that is not the future that I want my children to live in. A future where everyone must like (go to) the same parks, everyone must go to the same shops, everyone must go to the workplace accessible from their home or live in the home accessible from their workplace. Individualism is gravely important to humans. Getting away from individual transport is relinquishing all hope of individual determinism.
  - abyssin 8y ago
    How about your children breathing the same air as everyone else and sharing the same planet? Cars are a small exception in the way human have been moving around.

woodandsteel 8y ago

I think this is a desperation move on Toyota's part. Hybrids were a hot technology a decade ago, but they are being replaced by battery electrics. And I am guessing that Toyota's management is finally realizing that its huge bet on hydrogen fuel cells is never going to pay off. It's interesting to contrast this with the other top car manufacturer, VW. It has decided to push hard on EV's.

williesleg 8y ago

Elon is the master of the Electric domain. No wonder he's sold more Model 3's than any other luxury class sedan in the US. In fact, he sold more in the first QUARTER this year than any luxury car did ALL YEAR last year.