In this dataset, it means a filing that combines an electric drive axle or e-drive unit with a control strategy — torque vectoring, motor control, traction control or closed-loop control — and sits in propulsion or motor-control IPC classes such as B60L15/20, B60W10 or H02P. A patent that only covers the mechanical axle housing, or only covers a generic inverter with no axle-level torque logic, would not fall inside this scope. For a real freedom-to-operate check you need to read the actual claims, not just the classification, since IPC codes are assigned at a subclass level and can span broader subject matter than the specific claim language.

US20160046193A1 is cited 23 times, more than any other record in this set, largely because it has been available for longer and therefore had more opportunity to be cited by later filings. Citation counts inside a fixed search corpus structurally favour older documents — this is a normal artefact of citation analysis, not evidence that the patent is more commercially significant today than newer, less-cited filings. Treat it as a marker of foundational influence on drive-line architecture rather than as a ranking of current relevance.

Based on receiving-office data, China leads with 11 filings against 9 for the United States, with the two jurisdictions together covering the large majority of all filings in this dataset. Neither lead is decisive enough to call one jurisdiction clearly better — the choice depends on where the applicant manufactures or sells vehicles, since Japan, Europe, India and the PCT route each show only one or two filings and cannot be treated as reliable secondary markets from this data alone. Applicants should also account for the roughly 18-month lag between filing and publication when judging how current these counts are.

The trend line shows 2022, the rough midpoint of the coverage window, sitting at only 2 filings, while the peak so far is 6 in 2025 — a pattern that reads as bursty rather than steadily compounding. Because the total dataset is only 25 families, a handful of filings in any one year can swing the shape of the whole trend, so short-term flatness or dips should not be read as the technology losing relevance. The 2026 figure of 1 filing is also artificially low because publication lags filing, so recent years will likely revise upward as more filings publish.

The clearest gaps sit around multi-e-axle torque allocation using road-grade look-ahead data, closed-loop wheel-slip control tied directly to axle oil-temperature sensing, combined steering-and-torque-vectoring control that spans B62D and B60W classifications, and fault-tolerant motor control for dual-motor e-axle configurations. These areas show thin or no direct coverage in the current 25-family set based on IPC composition and abstract review. That said, high filing density in adjacent classes like B60L and B60K means the surrounding claim space is well occupied, so any new filing in these gaps still needs a full prior-art search rather than relying on this landscape alone.