Sina Science and Technology News on the morning of August 9, Beijing time, it is reported that according to a joint patent application and disclosure study conducted by Nikkei News and Tokyo analyst firm Intellectual Property LandscapeTeslaFrom its establishment in 2003 to March 2021, more than 580 patents have been accumulated.
Most patents (281 patents) can be classified as motor patents, followed by 168 transport-related patents. Transportation-related patents also include user operations. There has been a significant increase in patents related to user experience.
2018, TeslaApplied for a patent for steering system. The patent allows users to control the car through a touch screen. Users can control the vehicle with a swipe or click gesture on the screen, and users can get tactile feedback as if they had pressed a real button.
In 2019, Tesla applied for a patent for the intelligent summoning function. The innovation, launched in the same year, allows users to switch their cars to Autopilot mode to summon or park automatically, even if they are not in the car.
Tesla's third largest patent (71) can be classified as semiconductors, including solar cells. In 2016, Tesla acquired SolarCity, a solar discovery startup. In 2017, Tesla changed the company's name from "Tesla Motors" to "Tesla".
Since then, Tesla has expanded from an electric carmaker to an energy company focused on batteries. Tesla has a number of patents for moistureproof solar cells, as well as solar panel patents like ordinary roof tiles.
In May, Tesla disclosed a patent application for a retractable solar hood submitted in 2020. There is speculation that the retractable solar hood could be used on the Cybertruck, which debuts in 2019.
Computer technology is Tesla's fourth largest category of patents, with a total of 60 items. By the end of 2017, Tesla applied for less than 10 patents under this category each year. After that, Tesla applied for 18 computer technology-related categories in 2018 and 19 patents in the same category in 2019. The annual increase rate of computer technology-related patents exceeds that of transportation-related patents.
Among them, most computer technology-related patents relate to autopilot machine learning. The patent application includes a system for handling artificial intelligence errors and autopilot data encryption technology. This shows that Tesla is investing resources in the field of security.
Tesla has been recruitingAppleWell-known engineers with rich working experience and other big-name chipmakers. The new recruits have helped Tesla start the research and development of autopilot chips.
In 2019, Tesla announced that he had developed a processing unit called the fully self-driving computer (FSD). The performance of FSD is better than the GPU performance that Tesla previously purchased from Nvidia. Since the spring of 2019, all vehicles delivered by Tesla have been equipped with FSD.
FSD can calculate 144 trillion operations per second. In this regard, Tesla said it will make fully autopilot possible. In 2019, Tesla acquired DeepScale, an American startup that develops environment recognition technology for self-driving cars.
Autopilot developers, such asGoogleWaymo, owned by the parent company Alphabet, uses lidar sensors (LiDAR) to identify obstacles. LiDar is a technology that uses the method of sending laser pulses to determine the existence, shape and distance of an object. But Elon Musk, Tesla's chief executive, insists that LiDar costs too much.
Instead, Tesla is developing techniques that use camera video and machine learning to measure the distance of obstacles. As a result, Tesla's number of patents in this area has also increased.
The integration of automobile hardware and software has always been Musk's cornerstone strategy. Tesla's vehicles are updated regularly through "OTA" upgrades, and even fully autopilot can be achieved through software updates.
In addition, Tesla has 29 patents related to heat treatment and equipment in his patent portfolio, ranking eighth in the number of patents in this category. Although the number of patents is small, the content of the patent proves Tesla's strength in maintaining his competitive advantage.
Akira Yamauchi, chief executive of Intellectual Property Landscape, said thermal control was "a key technology for extending the mileage of electric vehicles".
The heat generated by the battery will greatly affect the performance of the electric vehicle. Heat accumulation can also affect the safety of vehicles. Tesla cars get energy from a series of small cylindrical lithium-ion batteries, which means controlling heat is crucial.
When Intellectual Property Landscape compares the thermal control patent data of different companies based on the number of citations and versatility, it is found that Tesla's thermal management system with coolant loop has the highest number of patents.
Tesla's advantage in thermal management comes from his masterpiece Octovalve, which redistributes heat generated by batteries to other parts of the vehicle, including air-conditioning systems. Octovalve was first used in Model Y, which went public last year.
The vehicle usually adjusts the heat one part at a time, but Tesla's goal is to optimize the heat regulation of the whole vehicle. The coolant circuit patent is the basis of the vehicle heat management.
"in terms of the number and content of patents, Tesla is steadily improving in manufacturing," Yamauchi said. "
In Tesla's patent application, the name that appears most frequently as an inventor is Franz von Holzhausen. Holzhausen is the chief designer of Tesla and used to work for Mazda. Holzhausen alone contributed about 80 design patents. He has worked with the dashboard display design of Model S and the eagle wing door design on the Model X.