US Patent Issued to TOYOTA JIDOSHA on May 13 for "Vehicle control device" (Japanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,296,825, issued on May 13, was assigned to TOYOTA JIDOSHA K.K. (Toyota, Japan).

"Vehicle control device" was invented by Koichi Okuda (Toyota, Japan), Masafumi Yamamoto (Nagakute, Japan), Yuuki Makino (Aichi-gun, Japan) and Yoshito Sekiguchi (Kariya, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A vehicle control device connecting platoon participating vehicles to one another via radio communication, to control platooning of the platoon participating vehicles, the platoon participating vehicle includes a leading vehicle and following vehicles that perform automatic follow-up running in line with a predetermined intervehicle distance from the lead...