One assignee leads the ranked field with 1,338 records, well ahead of the fifth-place holder at 355. However, the top 5 combined only reach 16.8% of all 18,202 records in scope, and the top 10 combined reach 24.1%, so leadership at the top does not translate into control of the field. The remainder of the ranking, out to 100 companies, is a long tail of automakers, suppliers, chipmakers and smaller filers.

Filing peaked in 2020 at 1,303 records and has since plateaued rather than continued climbing: 2021 stood at 1,215 and 2024 at 1,265, a 4% rise over that three-year window. Figures for 2025 and 2026 look lower still, but publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so those years are undercounted rather than genuinely down. Treat the plateau, not a decline, as the current read.

Hybrid/joint vehicle control (IPC class B60W) is the densest at 24.1% of the 18,202 records, followed by vehicle parts and accessories (B60R) at 16.6%. Traffic control systems, digital data processing and wireless communication classes each still clear roughly 9-14% of records, showing how much modern vehicle safety claim language now runs through software and connectivity rather than mechanical hardware alone. Because records can carry multiple IPC codes, these shares overlap rather than summing to 100%.

Sub-areas that sit adjacent to the densest classes but carry lighter claim traffic include battery-state-aware crash response, traction-torque redistribution tied to lightweight chassis design, sensor fusion for occupant-specific restraint timing, and road-environment mapping feeding drivetrain load prediction. These branches touch the same underlying sensor and control data as the dense classes but have not attracted the same volume of claims. Any of these is worth a closer freedom-to-operate check before drafting, since lighter volume does not guarantee an open path, only a less crowded one.

US20150012185A1, filed by Polestar Performance AB in January 2015, claims a specific method of computing closing velocity as a quota of distance over estimated time-to-collision using image capture and a sensor arrangement. It does not block every collision-avoidance approach; work that computes closing risk through a materially different sensor architecture or calculation method sits outside its specific claim language. Anyone building a comparable system should read the granted claims closely rather than the abstract, since the mechanism described here is narrower than the general safety concept it sits under.