Offbeat Automotive Patents

In 2014, the US Patent and Trademark Office saw a mind-boggling 615,243 patent applications roll through its offices. Of those, 326,033 were granted.

Lots of patents will never be made into products, and many come from rather obscure origins. Other patent applications, however, come from huge organizations, and the inventions these patents describe very may find their way into actual useful products.

A great many of the applications that find their way into the USPTO come from automotive companies, or tech companies with intentions of entering the auto space. We've assembled a few of the most recent patents – some extremely strange and other genuinely useful – for your perusal.

Click on the image above to begin the slideshow.

A practical, affordable, mass-produced flying car is like the Holy Grail and the lost city of El Dorado all rolled into one. The potential of such a vehicle would be huge, but every effort to bring one to market thus far has been met with failure. New patent renderings indicate one of the auto industry's biggest could be ready to take a stab at the affordable, personal, airborne vehicle.

According to Bloomberg, Toyota filed patent application 20150246720, which covers the design for a "stackable wing for an aerocar." The four wings would be stacked on the roof while in "roadable" mode and could be flipped out individually for flight. Interestingly, the patent doesn't seem to show any ailerons or elevators for roll and pitch control, although the profile view used in the drawings might not need to show any control surfaces. We can see, though, a vertical tailfin on the actual car, which includes what looks like a cut line for the rudder (for yaw).

As The Daily Mail notes, this is a fairly basic patent drawing covering the wings, and doesn't include anything on how the car would develop thrust for takeoff and flight. The only two inventors listed on the patent, which was originally filed back in March 2014, are in New Jersey and Michigan, Bloomberg reports.

Will a flying car from Toyota ever take off? Well... it's certainly no Moller Skycar.

"The concept behind Boeing's force field goes something like this: a sensor mounted on a vehicle would detect a shock wave caused by a nearby explosion. A computer then figures out the range direction of the shock wave based on sensor data so that it can know how to defend against it. As with all things in life, timing is everything.

Then, an 'arc generator' creates a 'second medium' (atmosphere being the first) by initiating an electronic arc that travels along a conducive path via a laser system that emits a series of pulses. The combination of which ionizes the atmosphere between the vehicle and the shock wave and creates a plasma field that temporarily protects the vehicle from the incoming shock waves."