When it comes to the development of technology and the goal of being the first to market with the newest features on vehicles patents have to be filed ahead of time to protect the company as the develop and create their ideas. One company filed more patent than any other in the automotive industry to appear to be the most forward thinking company in the industry, but the name just might surprise you, but it really shouldn’t. The company that filed for more patents than any other for the second year in a row is Toyota which may seem a bit odd to some.
Toyota hasn’t always been known for developing grand technology and for the most part they have been the one company you could count on to give you reliable vehicles year after year. For the most part the development of new items and features at Toyota have been slow enough that it feels as if they compete with Major League Baseball for the slowest changes. This approach has worked well for Toyota over the years and has helped them become the largest automotive manufacturer in the world. Now it seems they are looking for new ways to give us what we want.
As Toyota has impressively created vehicles that are reliable, they are also the company which has brought us the Prius. The Prius has been the most successful hybrid vehicle and has opened doors for other uses of hybrid technology other than filling the need of offering us great fuel mileage. It seems Toyota now feels they need to deliver the mobility solutions we want, even if they, and us as consumers, aren’t exactly certain what that is right now. Of course they’re working on autonomous driving technology (everyone is right now and it seems to be a race to the finish) but some of the patents they have filed lead us to believe they’re looking at even more.
Some of the patents include one that will put a stackable wing on a Toyota to create the possibility of a flying car while others include things such as an artificial skin for pedestrian safety mannequins to be used during their self-driving tests to help give us cars that will respond to emergency situations appropriately. After being a company that was slow to embrace new technology Toyota has emerged as a leader in the world of innovation and technology to be poised to show us a future that offers more mobility solutions than ever before.
To give you an idea of how many more patents Toyota filed than any other automaker, they are the only automaker in the top 20 on the list of the Intellectual Property owners Association. Over the past eight years Toyota has received 1,636 patents to lead the way and put itself in the same realm as Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft when it comes to filing patents and well ahead of all other automakers, leading us to believe their development team is much larger and more dedicated than any other car company on the market right now.
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