Ford Motor Co. has applied for a massive number of patents in 2015 as the brand is looking to increase its research on mobility and autonomous cars. The employees working for the American carmaker submitted around 6,000 patents, which stands for a growth of 36% compared to last year.
A majority of the new patents regard Ford’s Smart Mobility Plan which is focused on developing driverless cars, car-sharing platforms and different mobility options.
Raj Nair, Ford’s executive vice president and chief technical officer stated that “Our engineers and scientists are inventing ways to address mobility challenges more than ever — with more patent applications filed this year on car-sharing, wearables, bikes, cloud computing and in other areas to improve consumers’ lives inside and outside the car. By hosting — and participating in — more internal hackathons and innovation labs, our employees are stepping up to show that inventing is a priority for leadership in the industry.”
Some of the patents submitted by Ford include a new bike system which can detect bike lanes and inform cyclists of any path deviations, a safe car speed that is based on infrastructure, the average car speed and also GPS data, and a front brake light technology which would benefit communication in terms of car-to-car or autonomous driving to pedestrians.
Ford has filed for a high number of electrified car patents this year with the carmaker doubling this type of patents in the past five years, submitting 400 patents only in 2014. Ford has announced in May that it would make its electric patents available to other interested carmakers that are willing to pay a price for them in order to increase the development of such vehicles. Ford added that at the time being, the company has over 650 electrified car patents and is looking to get approval on its other 1,000 pending patents in the same area.