Federal Circuit Hands Ford Win over Hybrid Vehicle Patent

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit handed motor company Ford a win on Friday（4.26）, after affirming a decision that a hybrid vehicle patent is obvious.

Hybrid technology company Paice owns US patent number 097, which the US Patent and Trademark Office found to be unpatentable.

The patent describes and claims a control strategy for hybrid vehicles.

Ford sought two inter partes reviews (IPRs) of the ‘097 patent.

In one, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) determined that claims 1–6, 8–16, 18–26, 28–30, and 34 are unpatentable for obviousness, while in the other, the board determined that claims 30–33, 35, 36, and 39 are unpatentable for the same reason.

Paice appealed, claiming that the board had misconstrued several claim terms and made “insufficiently supported” factual findings in arriving at the obviousness determinations.

The hybrid technology company argued that the board had erred in construing “setpoint” to mean a “predetermined torque value that may or may not be reset”.

But the court disagreed, explaining that it had recently affirmed the same construction of “setpoint” by the PTAB in a related IPR proceeding involving another Paice patent in the same family as the ‘097 patent.

“Given the relationship of the patents, we affirm the board’s construction here as well,” said Circuit Judge Richard Taranto, on behalf of the court.

Paice also claimed that the PTAB had incorrectly read the first group of claim elements as “unrelated requirements”.

“But neither the language of claim 1 nor the language of the other claims at issue requires the simultaneous control urged by Paice so as to make the board’s reading incorrect under the broadest reasonable interpretation standard,” said the court.

It affirmed the PTAB’s decision.

In early March, WIPR reported that the US International Trade Commission had launched an investigation into Ford’s hybrid electric vehicles, following a patent complaint from Paice.

The complaint, which has not been decided yet, alleged infringement of the ‘097 patent, among others.