Renault is a French legacy car constructor, over 125 years old and has long believed cars should be part of our lives, helping to improve them & they should not be objects of pure performance.

Renault was the European pioneer of electric cars with the Renault Zoe, launched back in 2012. Helping to transform European society towards more sustainable mobility.

The good news : now the world is really transitioning towards electric vehicles. There are 75 new EV brands since 2017. Sales are accelerating worldwide. In China, 6 out of 10 sales are electric & 4 out of 10 in Europe.

The bad news : Electric vehicles present new dangers to our safety, putting everyone on the road at risk. Batteries can catch fire & then burn road-side for hours. Passenger extraction after an accident has become much more complicated with tech & batteries involved.

Fortunately, Renault has 15 years of expertise in electric vehicle safety and has developped many patented innovations and technologies to ensure electric cars are safer. Most have been developped with firefighters to ensure optimal safety results in real accident conditions.

This is the case of Fireman Access, a breakthrough that allows the rapid extinction of electric battery fires in less than 10 minutes vs an average of 4 hours with other constructors. Saving time for first responder to move onto other emergencies and dramatically reducing water waste.

Fireman Access is the first patent Renault is now publicly sharing through UNpatent.

Since 2017 there have been 75+ EV brands created worldwide. Sales are booming.

In this highly competitive market, brands are aggressively competing with flashy innovations like “Insane Mode” and self-parking. Those are cool. Those sell cars.

BUT one item suffers when EV sales surge: Our safety. Because electric cars have their own safety problems like battery fires and the sad reality is that EV brands don’t try to fix them. It’s just not that marketable.

Renault has a unique know how of electric car safety, with 15 year’s experience and a unique collaboration with firefighters. It’s led to dozens of patents to fix these EV safety issues.

Renault wanted to put these patents to the ultimate usage: better road safety for all.

UnPatent does this. Ensuring our safety is not a exclusivity.

UnPatent challenges the conventions of the secretive automotive industry by opening proprietary safety patents. UnPatent required working with Intellectual Property lawyers to understand how best to make available the patents, so that other constructros would adopt the patents (unlike Tesla’s Patent Pledge that came with a huge legal catch = using one Tesla patent meant giving up all of yours !).

UnPatent was launched with the United Nations, to give the platform 1/huge credibility 2/an immediate worldwide audience at the Road Safety Conference, with 50+ car constructors present.

UnPatent is a platform available on renault.co.uk/safety/universalpatent , allowing constructors to explore the different patents available and in one click ask Renault for access to the patent.

UnPatent was communicated in selected newspapers, events and a film to target automobile decision-makers and the industry at large.