Google Self-driving Cars Potential Patent Disputes Risk Assessment

As the Google self-driving cars could be available around 2018, not only the traditional automotive manufacture such as Toyota but also consumer electronics companies such as Apple announced their plan to launch self-driving cars by 2020. As the market for the self-driving cars increases and more and more market players enter into the market, patent disputes among competitors could be possible as we have experienced in the “smartphone patent wars.” Usually, core technical features of a specific commercial implementation are protected by patents. Thus, one can have insights regarding the technical details of Google self-driving cars from related Google patents. Furthermore, from patent citations information, one can have insights regarding competitors’ patents that cover similar technical scope of Google self-driving cars. Those competitors’ patents that cover similar technical scope of Google self-driving cars could be used to enforce against Google for patent infringement by competitors.

To find patents that cover similar technical scope of Google self-driving cars, and thus, to assess potential patent disputes risks, backward and forward citations based Amber Cluster Search was used. Sixty Google patents that cover the core technical features of Google self-driving cars were used as an input to find patents that cover similar technical scope of Google self-driving cars by other entities. All the values of similarity are aggregated for a specific patent owner. Thus, higher in similarity for a patent owner means higher in patent disputes risk. As shown in the following figure, many entities (including NPEs) hold patents that cover similar technical scope of Google self-driving cars, which means the high patent disputes risk.

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