Exploring the Technological Advances and Opportunities of Developing Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles: Based on Patent Analysis

In general, the fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) is regarded as more environmentally friendly than other vehicles. However, the commercialization of FCEV technology is hardly fulfilled due to high-cost fuel cells and an inadequate refueling infrastructure. Different technological trajectories of fuel cells are fiercely competitive, and related technologies are iterating quickly. It is an open issue in terms of what are the technological advances achieved or the opportunities for innovators. The paper proposes a novel approach to identify the key components of an FCEV by constructing the directed co-occurrence network of the International Patent Classification (IPC) and then adopts the Natural Language Processing (NLP) to construct the matrix of technology characteristics and functions. It is suitable to analyze the sentence structure of Subject–Action–Object (SAO) in patent documents by utilizing the NLP technology, which can help computers understand the text and communicate with us. The paper finds that the advances achieved in the fuel cell field are fuel cell composition, manufacturing fuel cells, and providing energy using fuel cells, and the advance in electric motors is supplying power for fuel cell vehicles, while the advances in hydrogen storage are to manage and store hydrogen. By contrast, the opportunities for innovators are to develop the control, diagnosis, and performance of the control system and hydrogen filling. This paper will be a contribution towards a better understanding of the advances and opportunities for developing FCEV technology.