Number of active patents owned by the leading automobile manufacturers 2000-2020

* Leading automobile manufacturers were selected by their 2019 revenue. The following data is the basis for the selection of companies in this statistic.

** A patent family is defined as a group of patent documents all of which have the same set of priorities. I.e., it is a group of patent documents that protect the same invention across authorities.

PatentSight's Technology Clusters automatically categorize all patents in the database by an unsupervised machine learning algorithm based on patent text data and patent metadata. Considering text similarity, they offer a more application-focused view on patents compared to IPC/CPC categorization. There are four levels available - each patent is assigned to only one cluster on each level (no co-assignments).

The Technology Cluster Automotive comprises patent families relating to or concerned with motor vehicles.

The owner of a patent includes all patents owned by a company and its subsidiaries (by at least 50%) based on comprehensive research on corporate structures, M&A, Spin-offs, company names changes, patent transactions. PatentSight also tracks former names of companies and subsidiaries, ongoing mergers and acquisitions, acquisitions of the past, reassignments, companies that have the same applicant, and transliterations by patent offices.