—twice as many as any other company
According to a report put together by Thompson Reuters’ Intellectual Property and Science Division, Toyota spent the last couple of years filing hundreds of patents related to autonomous driving. The report said that Toyota’s 1,400 patents outstripped any other automaker or tech company by a factor of two.
The report also noted that automakers in general have more patents related to autonomous vehicles than Silicon Valley companies like Alphabet Inc.’s Google do. While that might be surprising considering Google has appeared to lead the charge on self-driving cars, nearly all the major automakers in the US have some sort of autonomous vehicle division or lab at this point, whether they’re working on making fully self-driving cars or just moving to implement automatic braking in newer vehicles. Alphabet, Reuters says, ranks just 26th on the list of companies with the most patents related to self-driving vehicles.
Still, the number of patents a company has does not necessarily mean that that company will have success in the autonomous driving market. "Non-US companies tend to be more aggressive in filing patent applications than American companies,” Reuters wrote. "The quality of patents is also important, since not all are created equal.”
Back in 2013, Toyota subsidiary Lexus showed off its Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle, which included a host of sensors to prevent crash fatalities. Earlier this year, the automaker pledged to begin outfitting all of its new cars with auto-braking systems to prevent collisions. In November, Toyota announced the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), which is funded by a $1 billion investment from the company over five years, to advance autonomy in cars. And just today in a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Toyota announced that it had hired a number of robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous driving experts to lead TRI.
Still, the car company has stayed relatively out of the limelight compared to other car makers and tech companies. A Toyota spokesman told Reuters that the company was looking at making "a fully self-driving car as a long term goal, but one that must wait for autonomous driving systems that never make a mistake. In the meantime, Toyota is accelerating efforts to equip cars with automatic braking and other safety systems that can help avoid crashes."
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