GM, Chrysler Lag Industry Leaders in Green Tech Patents, Study Finds
By John O'Dell March 30, 2009
Report by PatentCafe.com shows GM to be light on green technology patents versus other major automakers.
By Robert E. Calem, Contributor
As President Obama was criticizing General Motors Corp. and Chrysler this morning for falling short on their efforts to produce viable survival plans, we turned up a new report on the health of various automakers' patent portfolios - a report that underscores both companies' problems, particularly in the area of green car technologies.
The "Automaker Patent Assets Intelligence Report" by PatentCafe.com studied the patent portfolios of GM, Chrysler, Ford Motor Co.,Toyota Motor Corp. and Volkswagen - the largest automakers in the U.S., Asia and Europe, respectively - and, among other things, ranked each by the percentage of its patent portfolio associated with green technologies.
The portfolio study ended with 2007 calendar year patent applications.
The report was delivered last week by PatentCafe.com, Inc., to the administration's Auto Task Force, incoming Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
According to the automaker patent study, Toyota is emphasizing green tech development the most, with 29.1 percent of its portfolio composed of green tech patents.
Ford is trailing closely, with 26.3 percent of its patents focused on green tech, followed by Volkswagen with 22.8 percent.
GM and Chrysler fall into distant fourth and fifth places; GM with 15.1 percent of its patents devoted to green tech and Chrysler with 14.6 percent.
Ford has the largest portfolio overall, with a total of 6,375 patents, followed by Toyota, GM, Chrysler and Volkswagen, which has only 728 patents.
It's not just the numbers that count, though, said Andy Gibbs, chairman and chief executive of PatentCafe, a patent search and analysis software firm headquartered in Sacramento, Calif.
Despite Toyota's numerical lead in green tech patents, an analysis of "forward citations" - the number of times new patent filings refer to earlier, seminal patents - shows that "peers in the auto industry feel that Ford's technology is superior" to Toyota's because Ford's patents are cited more frequently, Gibbs said.
Whereas Ford develops all of its patented technologies itself, he noted,Toyota uses a Japanese "Keiretsu" approach, relying on its suppliers to develop the patented technology and then sharing in the ownership of the patents.
The report suggests that automakers are better off concentrating their tech development efforts on their core areas of expertise - engines, transmissions and the hardware and software that regulates and makes motor vehicles go - rather than on things such as "infotainment" electronic and telecommunications technologies.
In that regard, Gibbs said, GM falls woefully short.
Compared to the rest of the industry, he said, the company has concentrated too much of its development efforts on telecommunications technologies, such as OnStar, that it may have been wiser to license from other companies (as Ford licensed Sync from Microsoft), and not enough on inventing green and mechanical technologies.
A lack of up-to-date data makes "Chrysler ... a wild card," he said. Before it was acquired by Daimler, Chrysler was a patent leader, inventing new technologies in a "very deliberate and very consistent" manner, said Gibbs.
The merged company, DaimlerChrysler, "ignored maintaining a persistent technology development" pace and may have singlehandedly "disadvantaged Chrysler's survivability options," Gibbs said.
But because patents legally remain private for 18 months after being filed and it was just August of 2007 that Chrysler was spun off from Daimler, Gibbs said there is not enough new patent application data to judge the quality and quantity of the newly independent Chrysler's recent technology development activity.
It is possible that Chrysler has been secretly working on green technologies that could help it in the future, Gibbs said.
The automaker, for example, recently unveiled a trio of prototype battery-electric and plug-in-hybrid vehicles and any Chrysler patents covering the technologies used may not have been public in the timeframe covered by the PatentCafe study.
LEAVE A COMMENT
Click here to comment on this entry.This shouldn't surprise anyone since Bill Ford had long emphasized eco-friendly technologies and sustainability as the way to move Ford forward in the 21st century.
The patent game is just that. It's a game. It's not necessarily reflective of what a company is doing. One company I worked for would actively encourage employees to come up with things to patent. They did this not to innovate, but as ammo for their legal department.
Getting past that, I need some help understanding the graph. It shows GM Green Tech at about 5% when the actual number is %15. It shows all others at about 36% when none of them actually break 30%. It doesn't smell right.
Maybe Chrysler is so low because they were filed under Daimler.
A one year sample isn't enough. Sample for at least five years.
Finally (for now), it doesn't seem right to exclude Honda, Nissan, Fiat, and others.
brn -
The top chart was developed to show a narrow snapshot of current activity (2007 only). For those most recent patents, GM is about 5%.
Overall (20 year time frame for all patents sampled), GM's patent portfolio is about 15% invested in green tech. This suggests that GM's most recent patent activity is actually pulling away from Green.
"Chrysler" patents actually include all of Daimler's for the period it was part of Daimler. The data in the full report shows that patents are not viewed by German automakers with the same vigor as US or Japanese automakers.
Every automaker can be analyzed. However, giving consideration to global economic impact and recovery, only the largest Japanese and European companies were compared to the US Big-3. In the case of Volkswagen, "VW" patents consisted of VW, plus all of its subsidiaries (Bentley, Audi, Bugatti).
A full copy of the report can be downloaded from http://starturl.com/AutoPatentReport
Hope that helps.
patentguru, that helped a lot. Thanks.
I still have issues with the report overall, but you cleared up a few items.
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