PATENT GRANTED IN MARCH 2020

I got it! Indeed!

I don’t mean “heure­ka” or “Ευρηκα”, mean­ing „I did find the solu­tion“, because I already did that a few years ago. Now, in March 2020 final­ly, I got my patent grant­ed by the Ger­man Patent and Trade­mark Office, offi­cial­ly, so to speak. See the Reg­istry Infor­ma­tion of the DPMA. 

A patent in the field of vehi­cle tech­nol­o­gy, i.e. for a new type of sec­ondary dri­ve, com­bined with the wheel sus­pen­sion and the dri­ve wheel itself. Traction‑X con­tra­dicts the pop­u­lar belief that at the begin­ning of the 21st cen­tu­ry every­thing in the field of mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing has already been invent­ed. Traction‑X is mechan­ics that can inspire, con­sist­ing of ground shafts for case-hard­ened run­ning sur­faces, pol­ished bear­ing-balls, pre­cise fits and exact cast­ings. Here, too, dig­i­ti­za­tion has long since found its way, because every wheel of a mod­ern vehi­cle is equipped with an elec­tron­i­cal­ly con­trolled brak­ing sys­tem that pre­vents the wheel from lock­ing dur­ing deceleration.

There would hard­ly be enough space here for a com­plete descrip­tion of the change­able saga, which is relat­ed to this inven­tion of dri­ve tech­nol­o­gy. The trig­ger­ing moment of the tech­ni­cal idea was a vaca­tion trip, in which I could com­pare the dri­ving char­ac­ter­is­tics of a small enduro motor­cy­cle with those of a small scoot­er in a direct relation. 

On the one hand there were large wheels with good rolling con­ve­nience, excel­lent sus­pen­sion com­fort and sta­ble road hold­ing in com­bi­na­tion with a tedious six-speed gear­box and a nar­row seat. That was the motorcycle. 

On the oth­er hand, there was an extreme­ly com­fort­able sit­ting posi­tion with the con­ve­nience of a cen­trifu­gal clutch and auto­mat­ic trans­mis­sion in con­nec­tion with bone-hard sus­pen­sion on small wheels that lit­er­al­ly plunged into every pot­hole, and wob­bly dri­ving behav­iour that required per­ma­nent cor­rec­tions. That was the scooter. 

How, I asked myself imme­di­ate­ly after return­ing the lat­ter of the two vehi­cles to two-wheel­er rental, could you com­bine the pos­i­tive prop­er­ties of one two-wheel­er with the good prop­er­ties of the sec­ond two-wheel­er? Tak­ing “the best of two worlds” and cre­at­ing some­thing new is the chal­lenge, you could say, also because the com­mu­ni­ty of motor­cy­clists is quite dif­fer­ent from the com­mu­ni­ty of friends of scoot­ers. Motor­bike and scoot­er are two dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions of one theme.

These tech­ni­cal con­sid­er­a­tions, which pre­oc­cu­pied my engineer’s mind for a while, soon result­ed in a few pen­cil sketch­es, fol­lowed by a 2D CAD tech­ni­cal draw­ing. This was fol­lowed by a sur­vey of exist­ing tech­nol­o­gy con­cepts and a search for exist­ing sim­i­lar patent appli­ca­tions or grant­ed patents. When I actu­al­ly did­n’t find what I was look­ing for, I reg­is­tered the inven­tion with the Ger­man Patent and Trade­mark Office. 

The expe­ri­ence with a pre­vi­ous appli­ca­tion, which I had writ­ten with the help of a patent attor­ney, helped me a lot. This time I was the sole author of the patent appli­ca­tion and since I for­mal­ly met all require­ments, the appli­ca­tion was pub­lished. Ini­tial­ly, a research request was ordered with the DPMA, which result­ed in a non-bind­ing exam­i­na­tion result in advance of any offi­cial inves­ti­ga­tion of theirs. After I had called for advice from a patent law attor­ney, I could tech­ni­cal­ly assess the appli­ca­tions held against by the patent office. We were able to high­light the essen­tial inven­tive points of my appli­ca­tion. I kept my claim and sub­mit­ted a exam­i­na­tion request. After a few for­mal improve­ments, par­tic­u­lar­ly an expan­sion of the state of the tech­nol­o­gy art, the patent was final­ly grant­ed about three years after the request. 

That was last month.