Check out our latest research on the ramp up of Tesla's Autopilot Driving Unit

The automotive industry shook a little yesterday with Tesla announcing that they are making their patents available to its competitors. We analyzed about 249 of Tesla’s patents & here is what we found overall. (Update. We also did a follow up analysis on  Tesla's patents to reduce battery fires which makes cars safer, lowers insurance costs & reduces the total cost of ownership of electric cars)

The categorization of these patents is an estimate based on analyzing Tesla's patent keywords, reading the abstract and sometimes even diving into the patent to categorize it. Our research & analysis includes patents & lawsuits so our automotive & patent research experience helped us dive into this much faster.

We have categorized about 184 patents & the battery & charging systems seem to have the most amount of patents at 104 & 28 respectively. Based on our estimates, 65 patents of the 249 patents do not fit into these buckets & seem to be very specific. For e.g.  There is a patent related to a vehicle’s suspension called the “Vehicle air suspension control system”. We will continue to analyze further & group some of these patents into smaller categories if it makes sense. We will update this post if anything changes.

Some examples of patents & categorizations are below: