this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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I was like 90% sure it's a joke. It's not
Thankfully it was published 4 years ago and didn't seem to go anywhere in that time. Good.
I immediately checked to see if it was posted on April 1st. It was not
good and bad news, simultaneous: No one can have hitchless towing until patent expiration: 17 years from then, afaik.
No one in the US/EU.
Folks in China and India will be cruising around with homelabbed wifi setups inside the next five years. Folks out in Nigeria and Yemen will be daisy chaining motorized vehicles for half a mile. Brazil will host an expo full of novelty wifi connected drone swarms. Cuba will invent some kind of insane telemedicine surgery tool that they only have the imported parts to build four of, but will revolutionize medicine for the next fifty years.
I don't think this will be a real product. I did see this several years ago and having a friend that works on patents, for large companies for whom the patent application fees are rounding errors on budgets, the incentive is to patent anything you thought of that could possibly become a product in the future. Even if you have no real plans to pursue it.