Autonomous Driving Patents: Top Companies & Filing Trends 2026
- 29.3% concentration. The five leading assignees hold 12,021 of the 40,975 records in scope — a field with a dense head, not a fragmented one.
- Filing cooled, but not collapsed. Filings ran 2,455 in 2021 down to 1,762 in 2024, a 28% pullback over three years, after peaking at 2,691 in 2020.
- Control claims dominate. B60W (hybrid/joint vehicle control) alone covers 25.4% of all records — well ahead of perception classes like G06V at 5.2%.
Filing growth compares 2021 (2,455 records) with 2024 (1,762) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 40,975 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
This dataset pulls 40,975 published records matching autonomous and automated driving terms combined with vehicle-control concepts — vehicle speed, traction torque, battery state, road environment, crash safety and chassis control. The search string deliberately pairs the driving-automation vocabulary with the control-systems vocabulary, so the corpus skews toward how a vehicle is actually driven and stopped rather than toward sensor hardware alone. Coverage runs from 2015 through the 2026-08-31 cut-off, with 2025 and 2026 filings still arriving in the record.
Because publication trails filing by roughly 18 months, the most recent one to two years in any trend understate real filing activity — a fact worth remembering before reading too much into a recent dip.
Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 40,975 records: how filing volume moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses carry the claim weight.
Filing trend, 2017–2026
Filings rose from 1,557 in 2017 to a peak of 2,691 in 2020, then eased to 1,762 by 2024 — a 28% pullback from 2021's 2,455. 2025 and 2026 figures are still filling in under the publication lag and should not be read as a continuing decline.
IPC subclass composition
B60W (hybrid/joint vehicle control) leads at 25.4% of all records, followed by G05D (control of non-electric variables) at 10.7% and G08G (traffic control systems) at 8.1%. Perception-heavy classes — G06V image recognition at 5.2%, G01C navigation at 6.2% — sit well behind the control classes, and records can carry multiple classes so these shares do not sum to 100%.
Shares are the percentage of the 40,975 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Autonomous Driving Patent Landscape with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about autonomous driving patent landscape and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe most-cited underlying inventions
US10437257B2 — Autonomous driving system (Toyota)
A vehicle includes an autonomous driving system that can determine whether an interruption of autonomous driving control is required. The autonomous driving system can determine that interruption is required based on an evaluation value dependent upon a target position and a control position, and an evaluation value threshold. The vehicle further includes communication systems that provide interruption information on the autonomous driving control to an occupant of the vehicle and to other vehicles around the vehicle if it is determined that the interruption of the autonomous driving control is required.Filed by Toyota, granted 2019-10-08. The claim scope centres on the interruption-decision logic and the surrounding-vehicle notification step, not on autonomous control generally.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20190258251A1 | Systems and methods for safe and reliable autonomous vehicles | 1,048 |
| 2 | US20200284883A1 | Component for a lidar sensor system, lidar sensor system, lidar sensor device, method for a lidar sensor syst… | 1,018 |
| 3 | US20100256852A1 | Platoon vehicle management | 999 |
| 4 | US20190364492A1 | Methods and devices for radio communications | 877 |
| 5 | US6587573B1 | System for controlling exterior vehicle lights | 836 |
| 6 | US20100256836A1 | Autonomous vehicle management | 785 |
| 7 | US20070219720A1 | Navigation and control system for autonomous vehicles | 774 |
| 8 | US20110190972A1 | Grid unlock | 708 |
| 9 | US20150224845A1 | Active vehicle suspension system | 700 |
| 10 | US20220126864A1 | Autonomous vehicle system | 680 |
Citation counts favour older records that have had more time to accumulate references — read them as a signal of influence within this searched corpus, not as a ranking of current importance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Three read-throughs from the concentration, class and geography figures above.
The head of the field is dense, not fragmented
Five assignees account for 29.3% of all 40,975 records, and the top ten reach 43.1%. That is a narrow set of players holding a large fraction of the claim space in control-oriented autonomous driving filings — new entrants competing head-on in B60W-style claims are competing against incumbents with thousands of filings each.
Control logic outweighs perception in claim volume
B60W (hybrid/joint vehicle control) alone covers a quarter of all records, more than double the next subclass. Perception and mapping classes — G06V, G01C — carry meaningfully fewer filings, suggesting the control-decision layer is where claim density is highest and freedom-to-operate checks matter most.
Recent-year filings are down across leading assignees, not just one
The three-year pullback from 2,455 filings in 2021 to 1,762 in 2024 shows up individually too: several of the most active filers post double-digit or steeper year-over-year declines in the latest year. Whether that reflects genuine pullback or simply publication lag on 2025–2026 filings is not yet resolvable from this data.
Filing activity concentrates in the US and EPO
The United States receives far more filings than any other office in this corpus (14,766), with Europe a distant second at 3,611 and WIPO PCT filings at 807. Strategy built solely around US filings misses a meaningful European filter, but the imbalance itself tells you where enforcement risk is currently concentrated.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to autonomous driving patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is filing, and where the gate is not yet closed
The ranked leaders hold a large share of the field, but the recent-year momentum figures suggest the pace of new claims from even the most active filers has slowed — leaving specific sub-areas comparatively open.
A single assignee leads by a wide margin
The top-ranked assignee holds 4,996 records against a fifth-place figure of 1,334 — a gap wide enough that the field has one clear leader rather than a tight cluster at the top.
Alliance filing is concentrated in a few pairs
The strongest co-assignee relationship in this corpus links two allied automakers at 716 shared records, well ahead of the next strongest pairing at 182. Only ten co-assignee pairs appear at all, so joint filing is the exception, not the norm, in this field.
Even active filers are pulling back in the latest year
Every assignee tracked for recent-year momentum shows a year-over-year decline in the latest year, ranging from roughly -65% to -95%. Given the 18-month publication lag, part of this is data still arriving rather than a genuine stop in filing — but the direction is consistent across filers.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA Corp | 34 | -65% |
| Toyota Motor Corporation | 12 | -92% |
| Denso Corporation | 12 | -77% |
| Honda Motor Co., Ltd. | 7 | -81% |
| Hyundai Motor Company | 4 | -95% |
| Kia Corporation | 4 | -95% |
| Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. | 2 | +100% |
| LG Electronics Inc. | 0 | -100% |
Where to take this analysis
The figures above establish where the field stands; the next step is usually a claim-level check against a specific filing plan.
Run a freedom-to-operate check on a specific control claim
Class-level density (25.4% in B60W) tells you where claim space is occupied in aggregate, not whether a specific claim you plan to file is blocked. A targeted search against the leading assignees' portfolios is the next step.
Check claim scope in EurekaTrack momentum by assignee before the next filing cycle
The -28% three-year pullback and the individual YoY declines shown here may reverse once 2025–2026 filings finish publishing. Re-running this view in a future quarter will separate a genuine slowdown from a publication-lag artefact.
Monitor filing trends in EurekaCommon questions on the autonomous driving patent landscape
The dataset's ranked leader holds 4,996 of the 40,975 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-place assignee at 1,334. The gap between first and fifth place suggests a single dominant filer rather than a tight cluster of equally sized portfolios. That said, this ranking counts records, and patent families are generally the fairer comparison unit since they neutralise continuation and multi-jurisdiction filing effects — so treat the raw ranking as directional rather than final.
Filings fell from a peak of 2,691 in 2020 to 1,762 in 2024, a 28% decline from 2021's 2,455 over that three-year span. However, publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 and 2026 figures in this dataset are still incomplete and should not be read as continuing the decline. The honest read is that 2020-2021 was a filing peak and activity has eased since, with the most recent trend still uncertain.
B60W, the IPC subclass covering hybrid and joint vehicle control, appears in 25.4% of all 40,975 records — more than double the next most common subclass, G05D (control of non-electric variables) at 10.7%. Perception-related classes such as G06V (image/video recognition) at 5.2% and G01C (navigation and gyroscopes) at 6.2% carry noticeably less claim volume. This suggests the control-decision layer of autonomous driving is more heavily claimed than the sensing layer, at least within this search scope.
The United States receives the largest share of filings in this corpus at 14,766, with the European Patent Office a distant second at 3,611 and the WIPO PCT route at 807. The United Kingdom, Canada and Australia each receive far fewer filings by comparison. This distribution reflects where applicants have chosen to seek protection, not where the underlying research or manufacturing takes place.
US10437257B2, assigned to Toyota, claims an autonomous driving system that decides whether to interrupt autonomous control based on an evaluation value tied to a target position, a control position and a threshold, and that communicates the interruption to the occupant and to nearby vehicles. It is a specific interruption-decision and notification mechanism, not a claim over autonomous driving broadly. Anyone building a similar handback or takeover-alert feature should review its claim language closely rather than assume it only affects Toyota's own systems.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.