Ford holds nearly 500 patents for various hybrid-engine related technologies, and it plans on putting them to good use. Ford announced in January that its next-generation Fusion sedan will be available in gasoline, hybrid and plug-in hybrid versions... Newswire > (http://www.chargedevs.com/content/news-wire/post/ford-fusion-family-product-almost-500-hybrid-patents)

I see that the new Fusion Hybrid is going to get 47 mpg in the city cycle. That is amazing! Once you get past 40 mpg you are only using 25 gallons of gasoline a month (if you drive 12,000 miles a year) which is incredible. 50 mpg gets you down to 20 gallons. A Volt on the other hand gets you down to around 2 or 3 gallons a month, or less...

Interesting that Ford has 500 patents but they still buy the Hybrid Synergy drive system from Toyota for the Escape & Fusion. It's Toyota's technology... Not Ford's.

Interesting that Ford has 500 patents but they still buy the Hybrid Synergy drive system from Toyota for the Escape & Fusion. It's Toyota's technology... Not Ford's.

I dunno. Ford's story, told in any number of places, is that they developed the tech independently, and elected to license Toyota's patents because they felt they were too similar. I haven't been deep in the guts of a Ford hybrid to know... The two things I do know point in opposite directions - they use Ford/Mazda 2.5l 4 cylinders converted to atkinson cycle (points in favor of Ford unique development, since it requires Ford control electronics or possibly Ford-Toyota melded control electronics,) and the transmissions and motors until recently were built by Aisin (Toyota's main transmission supplier, not usually a Ford subcontractor.)

These huge patent counts are merely a sign of just how totally broken the patent and "eye-pee" system is. Don't get me started.
You've violating an IBM patent if you entertain your cat with a laser pointer. You're violating a Microsoft patent if you use XOR to exchange two variables without using a temporary value. And those are ones that WORK! There are patents on faster than light space drives...there are patents on practical nuclear fusion by people who've never even done it impractically. Copyrights last effectively forever now - every time Mickey Mouse is about to become public domain, they get extended again, and it's costing us our culture - I can't tape a 1948 copy of Beethoven from a record - copyright still applies - but I can't buy one either, it's out of print.

High price of drugs? Modify one non functional part of the molecule, and we can still sell you a $65 pill that costs $1 or less to make - patent extended.

And it can cost 10's of millions of dollars to fight a patent even it it's ridiculous on its face. Microsoft knows this and gets more money from Android than they do from their own stuff - and you should see how ridiculous it is, it's truly silly, there was prior art but there are so many no one can afford to fight it - Barnes and Noble is giving it a shot now, so we'll see, but most people just license as an extortion payment rather than take it to court over what's going to cost 10's or 100's of millions of dollars - even if you win.

You can thank our crony capitalist governments who provide the best laws patent trolls can buy for this. It totally stifles innovation.

I'm not making any of this up - Novell recently went effectively bankrupt over this class of issue, and we only know because they were big enough to be in the news over it - when businesses can't compete on merits these days, they just send in the lawyers instead. See - entire mobile phone business for examples, or look here:
http://www.groklaw.net/