”Baby you can drive my car” period is over. Welcome the Self-driving vehicles.
With the first self-driving vehicles (SDVs) likely to be commercially available by 2025, it seems that the transport revolution is nearly upon us. Among the major players in this new emerging market, we have the established automotive firms investing in digital technologies, with an upcoming group of patent holders specializing in wireless communications and big data that are of crucial relevance to SDVs. The EPO published, in November 2018 a report entitled “Patents and self-driving vehicles” ( find it here ), which gives a very interesting overview of the patent landscape in this important emerging field. The patents and patent applications related to SDVs are divided into two main categories, the automated vehicle sector and the smart environment sector. The former covers technologies that are embodied in the vehicle itself (such as enabling vehicles to make autonomous decisions), while the latter concerns technologies that allow SDVs to communicate with each ...