Who controls the patent of the automobile industry?

For a long time, the automobile industry has been a legal battlefield. At first, the call for opening the parts market challenged the monopoly position of automobile manufacturers and brought more intense market competition. Subsequently, the high standardization of parts witnessed the transfer of economic control of the automobile industry from automobile brand manufacturers to parts suppliers, who no longer relied on a single automobile manufacturer. In this era of open innovation, parts suppliers are no longer just producing parts for orders, but jointly innovating with automobile manufacturers or other parts suppliers to develop high value-added products to consolidate their control fields. If intellectual property supports the bargaining power, it has now been lost from manufacturers. Manufacturers may be able to protect their intellectual property rights in the research results of cooperation with parts suppliers, but they have no such influence on the increasing innovation of parts suppliers. This turbulent industry has undergone rapid and amazing changes in the past 18 months, because Tesla, Ford and Toyota have opened thousands of automobile patents, which mainly involve electric vehicles, batteries and fuel cells. You can use the patents of Tesla and Toyota for free. What is the reason for this? Most car manufacturers are not charitable foundations. They are driven by investment and rely on continuous returns to survive. Patents are assets that bring cash. If patents are neither sold nor licensed, and no longer serve as a threshold for market entry, how can patents generate value on the basis of development costs? Automobile manufacturers can achieve many important strategic goals by opening up the free use of automobile patents. First of all, it reduces the risk of patent invalidation. Although the patent litigation in the automobile industry has not reached the white-hot level as that in the mobile communication industry, it is high in cost and interference, which is enough to avoid. Secondly, it provides a basis for the patentee's invention to become an industry standard, or at least become a part of the standard shared with other manufacturers. This may lead to locking the licensees of free patents in products, parts and manufacturing processes, and then providing them with relevant improvement and innovation options. Of course, these are not free, and you need to pay. Toyota's opening and promotion of fuel cell patents reveals the fact that it is almost impossible for a single enterprise to monopolize the whole market, indicating that only the way of * * * sharing or standardization is the most realistic investment benefit opportunity. Third, if there is competition between automobile manufacturers and their parts suppliers for industry direction control, then opening thousands of patents will hinder active and innovative parts suppliers, and their investors will question what benefits they can get from investing in new technologies, and no matter how good the new technologies are, they will be subject to competition from patented technologies that can be used for free.