The car industry is the best to reflect the strength of a country’s basic industry, because the upstream and downstream involve a huge industrial chain. Great Wall Motor’s annual sales exceeded one million units, it built a full-process factory in Russia, China vehicle brands began to expand overseas.
However, Honda brought Great Wall Motors to court in China recently because of the patent infringement of Haval H6.
Event process: Honda purchased a Haval H6 upgraded version at Beijing Boshilian 4S store. After dismantling, it found that the rear door mechanism was suspected of two patent infringements, requiring Great Wall Motor to immediately stop the infringement, including immediately stopping manufacturing and selling Haval H6, and destroyed the drawings, equipment, molds, etc., and compensated Honda for a total of RMB 22.14 million.
It is said that the compensation of 12 million yuan is not a big issue of the Great Wall Motor, but it will almost kill GWM of stopping production and sales of Haval H6 within the scope of patent infringement.
The Haval H6 is the soul of Great Wall Motor, it has won the sales champion for 72 consecutive months in China, the export volume is also large, it is the continuous profit manufacturing machine of the Great Wall Motor.
In this way, this case is particularly important for the reputation of Great Wall Motor. Honda, who always wants to be rigorous, has sufficient evidence to sue Haval H6 to the court, but the Great Wall Motor has denied these allegations and believes that the structure is different and the effect is obviously different.
Generally speaking, the structure of Haval H6 does have “ripoff”, but Chinese vehicle companies call it “reverse development”, it is well known that the chassis structure of Haval H6 is reversed to Honda CRV.
In fact, Honda’s previous case in China was also very provocative. Many years ago, Honda sued China’s Shuanghuan Auto, the reason for the lawsuit was that the S-RV produced by Shuanghuan Auto infringed the Honda CR-V patent, but the relevant court did not adopt it. Honda’s appeal finally ended in Honda’s defeat; but the situation afterwards shocked many people, Shuanghuan’s counterclaim against Honda’s infringement of Shuanghuan’s related goodwill, affecting Shuanghuan’s sales and other rights, and the relevant court ruled that Shuanghuan Auto won the case, instead Honda compensated Shuanghuan Auto for 16 million yuan. Although Shuanghuan Auto has been banned from production qualifications, the bad results of this infringement judgment still play a role until today, and it is also the base of many Chinese auto makers ripoff international companies.
Anyway, with the success of Jaguar Land Rover suing Landwind’s X7 infringement of the Range Rover Evoque design patent in 2018, Landwind X7 related products were discontinued and stop selling, becoming a new milestone, it marks that China’s relevant level has begun to abandon regional protection for some infringements of Chinese car companies, giving foreign companies a completely consistent legal status, therefore, since the beginning of this year, the situation of Chinese automaker ripoffing joint ventures or imported automakers has been greatly reduced, at the same time, overseas automakers who suffered previous infringement losses have begun to renew their appeals.
