Posted on 09/21/2023 4:42:38 AM PDT by FarCenter
TOKYO -- Chinese EV giant BYD has filed 16 times more patents over the past 20 years than industry leader Tesla, using legal frameworks to protect its battery technology while its U.S. competitor relies on production advances that are difficult to imitate.
Tesla applied for 836 patents from its founding in 2003 to 2022, while BYD applied for over 13,000 during the same period, according to Tokyo-based Patent Result. An automaker of Tesla's size usually would apply for "at least 10 times as many," said patent lawyer Hideto Kono.
Over half BYD's patents are battery related. The Shenzhen-headquartered automaker manufactures batteries in-house to reduce the cost of its electric vehicles and has applied for numerous patents related to cost-cutting.
Proprietary battery technology can be exposed through disassembly, placing importance on patents.
BYD's strength is in relatively inexpensive lithium-ion batteries that use iron phosphate as the cathode. Japanese and South Korean battery manufacturers favor ternary lithium batteries that use more expensive materials such as nickel and cobalt.
The company has developed similar cost-cutting measures for the chassis of its vehicles, such as its e-platform 3.0 that integrates the battery into the car body, reducing costs.
China is said to be home to more than 10,000 patent lawsuits each year, compared to the U.S.'s 3,000 to 4,000 and around 100 in Japan.
(Excerpt) Read more at asia.nikkei.com ...
The word “patents” and “China” make no sense in the same sentence with all the Intellectual Property theft that China does.
Hybrids make more sense than EVs but curious how they always push 100% electric.
About 5 or 6 months ago I was driving down i-95 in Connecticut and got stuck in the worst traffic jam I ever got into in my life. A gas truck tipped over and exploded in New London and I was stuck in this jam for at least 11 hours.
It took that long to get to the next highway, but something strange happened: Around 7 or 8 hours I started noticing a lot of abandoned cars by the side of the road. Then it hit me: ALL of them were EVs!!!
Me, I was low on gas and I finally got to a gas station, filled up in 2 minutes and back into the jam no worries. Convinced me never to buy an EV. It’s a scam. That thing runs out of juice whether you are in a traffic jam or not, you are screwed.
Bear in mind, nobody in the USA can enforce lawsuits for bad product on the Chinese.
I am fully aware of their progress in batteries, but also the potential for catastrophic disaster when they melt down. Lithium ion batteries are amazingly small and powerful, BUT they require great care in charging and controlling the discharge rate. Heat is a killer of batteries and electrolytic capacitors. When a bank of Lithium ion batteries catch on fire, they are extremely difficult to extinguish.
It’s China. How many of the patents are fake, plagiarized or unworkable?
CC
BINGO!! Well past time to OPENLY STEAL Chinese Patents. Turnabout is only fair play.
Will this “theft” cut into Joey’s 10% ???
Sure looks to me like the big push to EVs is actually a big push to transfer car manufacturing to China.
Agreed. Specifically, a plug-in hybrid (PHEV) would make the most sense for a lot of people over plain battery EV (BEV). You can commute to work and back often on power alone (i.e. 40 mile range) to avoid the gas station with sky high prices. And have a gas engine for long range, with the hybrid feature making the gas use more efficient.
The main reason I got a BEV is because I have tons of solar and I'm trying to make my wife and me mostly energy self-reliant. A PHEV has to be charged every day, even on rainy days when we get little free power, because the range on battery alone is about 40 miles.
But our BEV's much higher range allows us to go a few days in a row if needed without charging to let us almost always charge the BEV with free power. We put 26K miles in the BEV the first year we owned it, with about 22K to 23K of those miles charged at home. The overall home and EV charging efficiency for the past 12 months: only 18% of the power we consumed had to be pulled from the grid. The other 82% of our power was free, even though the home is all electric (no natural gas bill) and we do most of our driving in the BEV (little gasoline bought for the ICE pickup). Obviously the 3K to 4K miles in the BEV charged away from home wasn't from solar (charged at road-side chargers or hotels with free complimentary charging). And our driving habits don't seem to be slowing down: the 26K miles per year seems to be a norm.
But it works that well only if the variables are right for you (live in a good area for solar, plan to be at that house at least 10 years for the energy savings to make up for the cost, do other normal energy savings to your home like add insulation and seal cracks and use efficient appliances, drive enough miles in the EV for the gas savings to be worth it, don't live up north where brutal winters make EV's inefficient, live in the south where most of our power consumption is for AC in the summer which is when we get good solar to help us meet that demand, etc.)
Elon appeared on CNBC's "Jay Leno's Garage" Wednesday night where the 2 guys tooled around Elon's Texas-based SpaceX Starbase facility and chatted it up.
At one point Jay asked if SpaceX had a patent on the materials he used to construct spaceships. Elon's response ... "I don't care about patents. Patents are for the weak."
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