Right now I am getting the windows tinted on my new Prius prime. There's a Ford dealership close by so I decided to walk over and take a look at what they had on their lot. Some salesman comes out and I quickly tried to let him know that I'm just killing time. I told him that I just bought a prime. He said is that the Prius that is based on the Ford C Max? I told him that it was not. It was a plug-in hybrid. He said yes that's the one. The technology inside the Prius prime is licensed from Ford. He said thanks for buying a Toyota because every time I do they get $900. He followed that up with not a lot of Toyota people know that but really Ford was the one who pioneered the technology. I find that very hard to believe and call foul on his sales pitch. He ended up walking away from me midsentence. My question is, is this true? My dad has a Ford fusion energi and honestly I think that the prime technology blows that away. I can't imagine the Toyota would need to go to Ford for lessons on hybrid.
Other way around - Ford licensed Toyota's hybrid technology. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/10/business/ford-to-use-toyota-s-hybrid-technology.html?_r=0
As Lee Jay has said, it is the other way around. Ford paid to license Toyota's technology. Each of them can enhance on that technology, but Toyota has gone ahead of Ford with that technology. The salesman was sadly mistaken. #1 in Easley,SC
That guy was so pathetic. As soon as he started talking to me he realize he was in over his head. It was when I pulled my phone out to Google it that he just walked away. Of course I found the same references that you guys did. Toyota has been in the game much longer
It appears that Ford independently 'solved' the hybrid problem in a similar fashion to Toyota, then realized it was so similar they would be sued over it. So they cross licensed with Toyota to avoid that. Both Nissan and Mazda have just bought licenses without doing the research, I would call out those manufacturers before I would accuse Ford of not doing their own development. You can tell if a salesman is lying, it is every time their lips move.
I have been a Ford fan in the past, but when Toyota came out with the Prius, I ended up being a Toyota fan over Ford. Ford is my second choice after Toyota in my book. Ford still not up to par with Toyota. #1 in Easley,SC
This gets into a murky area where I understand Ford and Toyota have cross-licenses for the technology. Certainly the P610 looks a lot more like the earlier Ford hybrid transmissions: (photo taken January 2009 at the Detroit Autoshow) Ford mounted the power electronics with the transmission and Toyota used to keep them as a separate unit. Now both uses two motors that are not co-axial like the earlier Prius transmissions and the power electronics are 'bolted on' to the transmission housing like Ford had been doing. Bob Wilson
murky is correct. but i feel that if ford came up with the ideas at the same time, and developed the technology, they would have beaten toyota to the patent office and had a hybrid out in the late nineties. funny how petty car salespeople can be. is ford also making payments to the russian engineer who held the technology patent?
Without getting into the specifics of this situation, I just wanted to point out that patent infringement does not require that you to derive your work from the patented work; there can be infringement even if you come up with the patented work totally independently, never having heard of the patented work. In this case, both Ford and Toyota both acknowledged that the other had independently developed the same (or close enough to the same) solution for various aspects of a hybrid drive, so rather than getting into a long and expensive legal fight about who had rights to what, they just cross-licensed the relevant patents, and moved on with their own efforts. (I am not a lawyer; I just have some experience as a patent holder, and the above about the nature of patents is what the attorneys told me.)
The P610's entire gear reduction train also looks a lot like the Ford/Aisin HD-10/HD-20 and Ford HF-35, although with some simplification - the Ford gearboxes have three gears on the counter shaft, with the power split device ring gear on one gear, MG2 on another gear, and the output as the third gear, whereas Toyota has the power split device ring gear and MG2 sharing a gear on the counter shaft.
