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Run your analysis now →https://www.patsnap.com/resources/blog/rd-blog/over-the-air-update-for-vehicles-patent-landscape/ · Patsnap · data cut-off 2026-07-31 · downloaded from the live page
Connected Vehicles & V2X · Patent LandscapeOver the Air Update for Vehicles: Patents Shaping ECU Flashing and Rollback Protection
- Concentrated but not locked up. the top 5 assignees hold 33.6% of all 1,285 records in scope, and the top 10 hold 44.7% — leaving well over half the field to a long tail of single- and few-filing entrants.
- Filing has cooled from its 2021 peak. 146 records that year against 119 in 2024, an 18% pullback over that three-year span, though 2025-2026 counts are still filling in as publication catches up with filing.
- Software and comms classes dominate over vehicle-hardware classes. G06F and H04L each cover roughly 46% of records, while B60R and B60W — the vehicle-specific classes — sit at 11.1% and 5.4%, showing the claim activity is concentrated in the data and transport-protocol layer, not the vehicle body.
1,285
Published Records
34%
Top-5 Share of All Records
-18%
Filing Growth 2021→2024
US
Leading Jurisdiction
Filing growth compares 2021 (146 records) with 2024 (119) — 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 1,285 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
Published byPatsnap Research··8 min readSourced from Patsnap Eureka
Overview
What this landscape covers
Over-the-air update for vehicles spans the mechanisms that let an electronic control unit receive, verify and apply a software change without a workshop visit: delta update packaging, dual bank flash memory to survive a failed write, rollback protection so an attacker or a bad build cannot force a downgrade, and the signature verification steps that gate an update campaign before it touches a running diagnostic session. The 1,285 records in scope span 2015 through the 2026 data cut-off and were pulled using a search built around these specific technical terms rather than a broad 'connected vehicle' query.
Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the most recent one to two years in any trend chart will always look thinner than the underlying filing activity actually was — a pattern to keep in mind when reading the 2025-2026 tail of the trend line below.
Filing activity, 2017-2026
Source: Patsnap Eureka. Assignee ranking and totals. Derived from a Patsnap search on Over the Air Update for Vehicles covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
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The Numbers
Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 1,285 records: how filing volume has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses the claims actually sit in.
From a 2021 peak to a cooling-but-not-collapsing trend
Filings ran from 111 in 2017 to a peak of 146 in 2021, then eased to 119 by 2024 — an 18% decline over that three-year window. 2025 and 2026 figures (down to 13 for the partial 2026 year) understate real activity because of publication lag, so they should not be read as a sign the field has stalled.
Software and transmission classes lead vehicle-specific ones
G06F (46.7% of records) and H04L (45.1%) are the two largest classes, followed by H04W wireless networks at 21.3% and G07C checking devices at 14.6%. B60R and B60W, the classes tied directly to vehicle parts and hybrid control, cover only 11.1% and 5.4% respectively — evidence that most claim activity addresses the update pipeline itself rather than the vehicle hardware it eventually touches.
Shares are the percentage of the 1,285 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Source: Patsnap Eureka. Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Over the Air Update for Vehicles covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.
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A representative claim and the most-cited prior art
Representative Filing
US20230344645A1 — Electronic control unit, communication apparatus, and access administration system (Subaru, 2023-10-26)
SUBARU CORPORATION
An electronic control unit to be applied to a vehicle includes at least one electronic control unit configured to store a public key, receive a role list to set a specific work permitted to be executed from a communication apparatus, perform signature verification of the role list using the public key, set an available work list based on that verified role list, and execute the specific work when a matching request message arrives.The claim structure ties permission ('what work is allowed') to a signature-verified role list rather than to a fixed access-control table, which is the detail worth checking against any new ECU permissioning design.
Most-cited records in this corpus
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20130219459A1 | Content management systems and methods | 307 |
| 2 | US20150020152A1 | Security system and method for protecting a vehicle electronic system | 285 |
| 3 | US20200120458A1 | Methods and devices for vehicular radio communications | 279 |
| 4 | US20170093866A1 | System and method for controlling access to an in-vehicle communication network | 271 |
| 5 | US20100228404A1 | Method and system for configuring and provisioning a vehicle | 264 |
| 6 | US8650399B2 | Memory device and chip set processor pairing | 166 |
| 7 | US20140169564A1 | Method and system for secure and authorized communication between a vehicle and wireless communication device… | 136 |
| 8 | US20200160633A1 | Detection of unauthorized access to vehicle compartments | 132 |
| 9 | US20190268420A1 | Broker-based bus protocol and multi-client architecture | 116 |
| 10 | WO2013144962A1 | Security system and method for protecting a vehicle electronic system | 116 |
Citation counts accumulate over time, so older records such as the 2013 and 2010 filings below lead the table by influence rather than by current filing relevance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
Source: Patsnap Eureka. Citation counts and representative records. Derived from a Patsnap search on Over the Air Update for Vehicles covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
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What the data means for filing strategy
Three patterns stand out once the ranking, trend and technology mix are read together.
Concentration
33.6% / 44.7%
top 5 / top 10 share of 1,285 records
Leadership is real but not exclusionary
The leader holds 111 records and fifth place holds 60 — a steep drop-off inside the top five, then a much flatter curve from tenth place (26) downward. With 55.3% of records held outside the top 10, there is clear room for a new entrant to build a defensible position rather than simply licensing around incumbents.
Based on the 100-company ranked assignee list.
Momentum
146 → 119
peak-year to 2024 filings, -18%
A post-peak plateau, not a retreat
2021 was the high-water mark at 146 filings; by 2024, the last year treatable as complete, volume had settled at 119. That is a real pullback, but it follows a run-up from 111 in 2017 and should be read as normalisation after a filing wave tied to early OTA rollouts, not as the field losing relevance.
2025-2026 figures are excluded from this comparison due to publication lag.
Claim geography
46.7% G06F
share of records carrying this class
The fight is in software, not sheet metal
G06F and H04L each touch close to half of all records, while the vehicle-specific classes B60R and B60W sit in single-digit-to-low-double-digit territory. New filers competing on data-processing and transmission claims are entering the densest part of the field; those targeting vehicle-integration specifics face a comparatively lighter claim thicket.
Class shares sum above 100% because records carry multiple IPC codes.
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Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to over the air update for vehicles, with the prior art for and against each one.
Source: Patsnap Eureka. Co-assignee relationships and derived observations. Derived from a Patsnap search on Over the Air Update for Vehicles covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
Players
Who is filing and where the openings sit
The ranked list spans automakers, tier-one suppliers and security specialists, but recent-year momentum shows even some established filers pulling back sharply — a sign the leaderboard captures historical strength more than current-year appetite.
Automakers and OEM groups
432 records
top 5 combined, 33.6% of 1,285
OEMs anchor the top of the ranking
Vehicle manufacturers and their technology arms account for a large share of the top-five concentration, filing across signature verification, update-campaign management and diagnostic session control — the layers closest to the vehicle fleet they operate.
Ranking is by patent family count, not by portfolio value.
Security and integrity specialists
26 records
tenth-place assignee volume
Dedicated security vendors hold a distinct lane
Firms built specifically around vehicle security infrastructure appear well inside the ranked group despite narrower product scope than the OEMs, reflecting concentrated filing around rollback protection and key-management claims rather than broad vehicle-systems coverage.
Momentum for several of these filers has slowed to zero or negative in the latest tracked year.
Long tail of entrants
55.3%
share of records outside the top 10
Most of the field is unconsolidated
More than half of all records sit outside the ten leading assignees, spread across the remaining ranked companies and unranked filers. That is the practical opening for a company that wants to build a position rather than license one.
Ranked list covers 100 companies; it is not a top-50 or top-100 designation by the data source.
Recent-year filing momentum
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Snap-on Incorporated | 1 | -83% |
| Yinwang Intelligent Technologies Co., Ltd. | 1 | -50% |
| Volvo Car Corporation | 0 | -100% |
| Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Panasonic Intellectual Property Corporation of America | 0 | — |
| Integrity Security Services LLC | 0 | -100% |
| BlackBerry Limited | 0 | — |
| Intertrust Technologies Corporation | 0 | -100% |
Source: Patsnap Eureka. Assignee-level momentum. Derived from a Patsnap search on Over the Air Update for Vehicles covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
What's Next
Where to take this analysis
The figures above answer where the field stands. The next questions are usually specific to a product roadmap or a freedom-to-operate concern.
Map a specific claim against this corpus
Run a candidate claim — for example a new rollback-protection mechanism — against the 1,285 records here to see which prior art it sits closest to and whether a filed range is already occupied.
Explore in Eureka →Track the assignees pulling back
Several filers show sharp negative year-over-year momentum in the latest tracked year; understanding whether that reflects a completed filing cycle or a strategic shift matters before assuming the space is opening up.
Explore in Eureka →Check the white-space chips against a real product spec
The under-claimed branches listed above are starting points, not conclusions — the next step is checking them against an actual update architecture to see whether the gap is real or just a labelling artifact of the IPC scheme.
Explore in Eureka →Source: Patsnap Eureka. Forward-looking reading of the same dataset. Derived from a Patsnap search on Over the Air Update for Vehicles covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
FAQ
Common questions about OTA update patents
This dataset identifies 1,285 published patent families matching search terms specific to vehicle software update mechanisms, including electronic control unit updates, delta updates, rollback protection, dual bank flash, signature verification and diagnostic sessions, covering 2015 through the 2026 data cut-off. That figure is scoped to a specific technical search string, not to 'connected vehicle' patents broadly, so a differently worded search would return a different total. Because publication lags actual filing by roughly 18 months, the true number of filings made in 2025 and 2026 is still understated in current published data.
The ranked list covers 100 companies spanning automakers, tier-one suppliers and dedicated vehicle-security vendors. The leader holds 111 records, and filing concentration drops steeply through the top five (which together hold 33.6% of all 1,285 records) before flattening out — fifth place holds 60 records and tenth place holds 26. More than half of all records sit outside the top 10 filers, indicating a genuinely fragmented rest of the field rather than a two-tier market.
Filing rose from 111 records in 2017 to a peak of 146 in 2021, then eased to 119 by 2024 — an 18% decline over that three-year span, which is the most recent period that can be read as a complete trend. Years after 2024 show lower counts, but that reflects publication lag rather than an actual drop in filing, since a filing made today typically is not published for about 18 months. Treating the 2021 peak as a ceiling and the 2024 figure as the more reliable current baseline is the safer read of this trend.
The two largest IPC classes are G06F (electric digital data processing), covering 46.7% of the 1,285 records, and H04L (digital information transmission), covering 45.1%. Wireless communication (H04W) and checking/attendance devices (G07C) follow at 21.3% and 14.6%. Vehicle-specific classes B60R and B60W cover only 11.1% and 5.4% of records respectively, showing that most patent activity addresses the software and communications layer of the update process rather than vehicle-side hardware integration.
Given the class distribution, areas that intersect the dense G06F/H04L core with the thinner vehicle-integration classes appear comparatively under-claimed — for example cross-domain rollback coordination spanning multiple ECUs, or update-campaign orchestration that touches business-process classes like G06Q, which covers only 4.1% of records. These are not guarantees of open claim space, but they are areas where the density evident in the core update-mechanism classes has not yet been matched in the adjacent integration layers.
Answers are grounded in the same dataset. Derived from a Patsnap search on Over the Air Update for Vehicles covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish.Run this in Eureka MCP
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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.