Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

According to news in the morning of February 28, Beijing time, Amazon has reportedly applied for the most patents for the next generation of car driving technology among the five major technology giants in the United States in the past 20 years.

Amazon has made a key acquisition in self-driving, sending its patent applications in the field soaring, surpassing Google, its early leader.

The competition of the next generation of driving technology mainly depends on the competition in the field of intellectual property such as AI, and the entry of technology giants into this field will change the nature of competition and cooperation in the automobile industry.

The development of the next generation automobile needs the help of CASE technology, namely, connected, autonomous, shared and electric. Such intellectual property rights have been a key part of recent negotiations between Nissan and Renault to change capital relations. Renault has teamed up with Google to develop "software-defined cars".

The relationship between technology giants and big car companies is closer than ever before. Apple, for example, has called on automakers to adopt its proprietary software.

Nissan and Astamuse, a Tokyo-based market research company, counted patents filed by Google parent companies Alphabet, Apple, Facebook parent company Meta, Amazon and Microsoft since 2003.

During this period, Amazon applied for 1649 patents, ranking first. Followed by Alphabet, with a total of 1355 items. Apple ranked fourth.

Amazon has filed more than 200 patents in four years since 2016. In 2020, Amazon acquired Zoox, a self-driving technology development company founded in 2014. Zoox has accumulated technology through repeated testing on public roads.

Nikkei also calculates the competitiveness score of each patent based on the number of relevant citations, the number of countries to which the patent applies, and other factors. Then the scores of individual patents are multiplied by variables such as the remaining years to calculate the competitiveness scores of these companies in eight areas such as autopilot and Internet connectivity.

In the area of the Internet of things, which uses digital technology to achieve complex logistics operations, Amazon scored 4073 million, far surpassing the second-ranked Alphabet (1782). In terms of individual patents, Amazon monopolizes three of the top five patents in connectivity, suggesting that the company is considering applying automatic distribution technology to e-commerce.

In the self-driving field, the Alphabet scored 4018 million, 10 per cent higher than Amazon, which ranked second. Alphabet also scored high in other areas such as predicting car and pedestrian movements, possibly because it wanted to apply the technology to self-driving taxis.

In recent years, Apple has been investing heavily in technologies such as automatic charging and heat dissipation management for electric vehicles.

Large car companies still have a strong sense of presence in the next generation of driving technology. Honda, for example, announced that it applied for more than 4000 patents for self-driving technology in fiscal year 2020. Although you can't just look at the number, that number is four times that of Alphabet, and Alphabet has filed more self-driving patents than the other four tech giants.

Astamuse said that Alphabet's self-driving patent is highly recognized in the industry. Tsuguo Nobe, a visiting professor at Nagoya University who studies self-driving IT, said that large car companies lag behind tech giants in areas such as using artificial intelligence for deep learning.

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