US 8046162

I'll search for authoritative records on US 8046162 and check for any 2026 CAFC docket activity.

Let me run additional targeted searches for litigation/docket activity and the USPTO record.

US Patent 8,046,162 B2 — Summary

Sourcing note: The authoritative full text of US 8,046,162 B2 (Google Patents, https://patents.google.com/patent/[US8046162B2](/patent/US8046162B2)/en) was available. I searched for CAFC 2026 docket activity and found none — see the docket section below for details and the explicit non-match I excluded.

Bibliographic data

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8046162B2/en ; corroborating record at https://patents.justia.com/patent/8046162

Abstract (as issued)

"Systems and methods are provided for prioritizing traffic information and broadcasting the traffic information in a prioritized order. The method generally comprises receiving data regarding traffic conditions on various roads, wherein each road can be characterized as being a major, medium, or minor road. In one approach, traffic data regarding major roads are broadcast to vehicles first, followed by traffic data regarding medium roads, while traffic data regarding minor roads are either broadcast last or not at all, depending on the traffic information handling capacities of the vehicles and the traffic information system in general."

Independent claims — plain language

Claim 1 (system):

1. An information center generates and prioritizes broadcast data messages about traffic data for multiple roads, and sends those prioritized messages from a remote location to at least one vehicle currently traveling on a route to a destination.
2. A database is in communication with the information center and holds information about that vehicle's current route to the destination.
3. The information center assigns a priority rating to each message based on that stored route information, and sends each message at a frequency determined by its assigned priority rating (as opposed to a one-time ordering).
4. Higher-rated messages are sent more frequently than lower-rated ones.

Claim 11 (method): The method counterpart of claim 1 — retrieve the vehicle's current-route information from a database; generate a broadcast data message containing traffic data for at least one road; assign a priority rating based on the route information; send the message from the remote location at a frequency determined by the rating; higher-rated messages go out more frequently than lower-rated ones.

Notable drafting point: The specification's summary frames the invention in terms of broadcast ordering ("first … before …") and priority by road type (major/medium/minor). The granted independent claims are narrower/different in focus: they require priority to be tied to the vehicle's current route to a destination point and to control transmission frequency, not merely ordering. Road type appears only in the dependent claims.

Dependent claims at a glance

• 2–3: priority rating also based on road type — major, medium, or minor.
• 4: priority also based on whether the traffic data is on a road that is part of the vehicle's current route.
• 5: information center implemented as server(s) with a broadcast data message generator application that generates, converts to broadcast format, determines send timing, and transmits.
• 6–7: one-to-many communication system; specifically satellite radio network transmission.
• 8: each broadcast message carries filter data (based on a vehicle characteristic), the priority rating, and the traffic broadcast data.
• 9–10: priority based on proximity of the traffic data to a road on the vehicle's route; closer road ⇒ higher priority.
• 12–17: method counterparts of the above (server/generator application; on-route determination and comparison logic; proximity ranking; filter data composition).

Encoding detail from the specification (FIGS. 5a–5c, 8, 9): the priority rating may be placed in the message header and/or payload; in one exemplary 2-bit scheme, major = 11, medium = 10, minor = 01, unknown = 00. The rating can alternatively be carried in a "packet type" field of the single- or multi-packet header, or in a dedicated priority criteria field. The specification incorporates by reference U.S. application Ser. No. 11/232,311, "Method and System for Broadcasting Data Messages to a Vehicle," filed Sep. 20, 2005, for the filter-code (FCX) scheme.

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CAFC 2026 docket check — no match found

I searched for Federal Circuit / 2026 docket activity and found no docket entry, appeal, or decision involving U.S. Patent 8,046,162 in the Federal Circuit's 2026 dockets. I cannot rule out activity that is not indexed in the sources reachable by this search, and I have no authoritative PACER/CAFC docket feed for 2026 in this environment — so treat this as "nothing found," not "confirmed none."

To comply with the instruction not to return results for similar numbers, I explicitly excluded the following near-number distractors that surfaced:

• U.S. Patent 7,928,348 — the subject of Aisin Seiki Co., Ltd. v. Intellectual Ventures II LLC, IPR2017-01538, with American Honda Motor Co., Inc. joined; that Federal Circuit appeal concerns the '348 patent, not 8,046,162.
• US 2008/0275628 A1 (Motorola, application 11/743,364) — a different traffic-information application.
• US 8,046,247 and IEEE document 8046162 — unrelated identifiers that appeared in search noise.

Uncertainties

• The Google Patents "Adjusted expiration 2028-06-16" and "Active" legal status are auto-generated and expressly flagged by the source as non-authoritative; verify against USPTO PatentCenter/Global Dossier for any maintenance-fee or terminal-disclaimer effects.
• Ancillary data (examiner, attorney, and the EP/DE family titles) is drawn from the Justia and Google Patents records and is consistent between them, but I did not independently confirm it against a primary USPTO document image.
• I did not identify any litigation, IPR, or reexamination record specifically naming 8,046,162; if your matter depends on that, a dedicated PACER/PTAB search should be run.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 8046162 across patent litigation sources.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

Let me check several specific litigation avenues, including the Traffic Information LLC case identified.

Summary of Findings

I could not identify any litigation — district court, appellate, ITC, or PTAB — in which U.S. Patent No. 8,046,162 is the patent-in-suit or an asserted patent. No responsive search result tied this specific number to a complaint, IPR petition, or appeal.

Because I must not auto-correct or conflate identifiers, I'm flagging below one traffic‑information case against the same owner that appeared in the results, along with an explicit statement of why I could not attribute the '162 patent to it.

What I searched

• General queries for "US patent 8046162 litigation," "8,046,162 patent infringement complaint," and "8046162 … case docket."
• Patent‑holder‑specific queries (Honda + the '162 title, "Data broadcast method for traffic information").
• NPE/traffic‑patent queries (the Google Patents "Cited By" list surfaces nothing that reads as an infringement suit against this number).
• Sources surfaced included: Google Patents family/citation data, RPX Insight litigation pages, CourtListener/PACER‑derived documents, PTAB dockets, and the Federal Circuit opinion feed.

The only references to U.S. 8,046,162 that appeared were bibliographic/citation items — e.g., OCR'd patent documents and a Justia page listing it among prior‑art references — not litigation records. That is consistent with a patent that is cited as prior art rather than asserted in a case.

Adjacent case found — but NOT confirmable as this patent

Why this is only "adjacent," not a hit:

• The RPX page shows one patent‑in‑suit, but my search did not return the patent number, so I cannot state it is 8,046,162.
• U.S. 8,046,162 issued 2011‑10‑25, roughly four years after this 2007 suit was filed and closed. The underlying application (11/266,879) published as US20070106454A1 on 2007‑05‑10, so it existed as a published application in the 2007 timeframe — but a pending publication is generally not a §271 infringement "patent‑in‑suit." This makes it unlikely the '162 patent itself was asserted here. I am explicitly declining to assert it.
• The cause‑of‑action fields ("Infringement," "Willful Patent Infringement") and market sector ("Consumer Electronics and PCs") are generic and don't identify the patent.

I also encountered two other Honda cases that involve different patents and should not be confused with this one:

• Eclipse IP LLC v. American Honda Motor Co. (C.D. Cal., 2012) — patents on "Notification Systems and Methods that Consider Traffic Flow Predicament Data."
• American Calcar Inc. v. American Honda Motor Co. (S.D. Cal. / Fed. Cir.) — Honda's cross‑appeal concerning validity of the "Notable Condition" patent (’759) and related patents such as ’485/'875.

Recommendation before relying on a "no litigation" conclusion

My searches were web‑indexed and cannot be treated as a complete litigation clearance. To confirm the negative, check these directly, filtering strictly on the literal number 8,046,162:

• Unified Patents litigation portal — portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist
• RPX Insight — /litigation search filtered to patent 8,046,162
• PACER / Docket Alarm / CourtListener RECAP — full‑text party and patent‑number searches (note: the patent owner is Honda Motor Co., Ltd., a frequent defendant, so a name search will return many unrelated hits).
• USPTO Patent Center / Global Dossier and PTAB — for any IPR/PGR/CBM naming the '162 patent (none surfaced in my search).
• Assignment records — to check whether title ever transferred to an NPE (the Google Patents record lists Honda as both original and current assignee).

Bottom line: Based on the available search results, no litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 8,046,162 is known. The only traffic‑information case against the same patent owner that I found (Traffic Information LLC v. American Honda, 2:07‑cv‑00391, E.D. Tex.) could not be tied to this number and, given the '162 patent's 2011 issuance, likely concerned a different patent. I cannot rule out litigation that isn't reflected in the web‑indexed sources I was able to reach.

I'll start by verifying the structured data and searching for any PTAB activity the ODP may not have indexed.

Let me run additional targeted searches to confirm the absence of PTAB activity and check for related litigation.

One more check for PGR/CBM and any recent filings.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 8,046,162: zero (0). The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPRs, PGRs, or CBM reviews, and my web searches (Google Patents, Justia, RPX, PTAB/PTACTS results, CourtListener) surfaced no petition, institution decision, or Final Written Decision naming this patent. There is therefore no breakdown into active / invalidated / sustained / settled / denied — the category is empty. The bottom-line defensive posture is unusual for this fact pattern: this is not a patent that has been battle-tested at the PTAB, because it appears never to have been challenged there at all. That cuts both ways — no claims are canceled and therefore none are confirmed either; the claims stand on their original prosecution record with no PTAB-tested construction.

Because there are no proceedings, the per-proceeding template below is not populated with fabricated entries. (Constraints: I will not invent proceeding numbers.)

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No proceedings to detail

There is no {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} — {Petitioner} v. {Patent Owner} to report. I am expressly declining to manufacture one. What I can document is the surrounding context, which is what a defendant actually needs:

Patent identity

• Patent: US 8,046,162 B2, "Data broadcast method for traffic information"
• Inventor: Ryoichi Nonaka
• Assignee: Honda Motor Co., Ltd. (original and current)
• App. No. 11/266,879; filed 2005-11-04; granted 2011-10-25
• Legal status: Active; adjusted expiration 2028-06-16
• 17 claims; independent claim 1 (system) and claim 11 (method), with dependence on road type (claims 2–3), route membership (claims 4, 13, 14), and proximity-to-route (claims 9, 10, 15, 16)
• Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8046162/en

Family / counterparts

• EP 1 783 718 B1 (EP06018046A) — status per Google Patents: Not-in-force
• DE 60 2006 007 786 D1

The foreign counterpart being not-in-force is a data point a defendant can use commercially, but it has no issue-preclusion effect in a U.S. forum.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: everything UNTESTED. No claim of US 8,046,162 has been canceled, narrowed, disclaimed, or confirmed through an AIA trial. Claims 1–17 are all live and, in the PTAB sense, unexamined — meaning there is no FWD to lean on, no Board construction of "priority rating," "route to the destination point," or "frequency determined based on the assigned priority rating," and no claim-level invalidity finding that a defendant could cite for collateral estoppel or as persuasive authority.

Estoppel landscape: § 315(e)(2) is a blank slate — and that is a problem for you, not a benefit. Because no petitioner has ever run an IPR here, no one is estopped. But note the asymmetry: you get a clean first bite at the PTAB. There is no prior petitioner's institution decision or FWD that would have locked in the Board's preliminary view of the art, so your petition would be judged fresh under §§ 311–314. The prior-art universe is nonetheless large — the patent carries roughly 179 cited references and 163 straight citations, heavily weighted toward 1990s traffic-information and navigation art (e.g., US 5,698,056 to Omron, US 5,636,245 to MITRE, US 5,264,648/5,632, etc. class of road-information receivers), which is a crowded and well-developed field. The relevant question is not whether no petition exists but whether the art is strong enough to file one.

Pattern signals — and the counter-signal. Two observations:

1. This is an operating-company patent, not a troll patent. Honda Motor Co., Ltd. is the assignee. I found no evidence of US 8,046,162 being asserted in litigation — no ITC complaint, no district-court infringement suit naming this patent as the patent-in-suit. A Justice/RPX hit (Traffic Information LLC v. American Honda Motor Co., 2:07-cv-00391, E.D. Tex.) is about someone else's patents asserted against Honda, not this patent, and is unrelated.
2. The absence of IPRs is therefore consistent with the absence of assertions. Patents attract IPRs when they are asserted. A defensive aggregator like Unified Patents does not appear anywhere in the chain. So the "no PTAB activity" signal here most likely means "not being asserted," not "so bulletproof nobody bothered."

Practical implication: If you have received a demand letter citing US 8,046,162, the sender is very likely wrong about ownership or is working from a stale portfolio list — the patent reads as a Honda-held broadcast/navigation patent that, on the public record, has never been enforced or challenged. Verify chain of title and standing first; that is a more likely dispositive issue than validity. If, on the other hand, you are evaluating whether to file an IPR, you have an unusually clean runway (no estoppel from a prior petitioner, no adverse FWD), but you will be the first to put the claims to the test, with no roadmap from a prior panel.

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Recommended next steps

• No PTAB activity exists — say it plainly in any briefing or opinion. There is no FWD to link, no institution decision to quote, and no proceeding number to cite. Do not imply otherwise. The default from the ODP structured data ("no AIA trial proceedings") matched my independent web-search results.
• Confirm standing and chain of title before anything else. The patent is assigned to Honda Motor Co., Ltd. If an entity other than Honda is asserting it, demand the assignment record (USPTO Assignment database) and confirm the patent was transferred and that the assignee has standing to sue. This is likely dispositive if the assertion is spurious.
• If you are the first prospective petitioner, pull the full file history and the top cited art. The cited-references list in the "Citations" sections of the Google Patents page is the starting inventory. Focus on the 1994–2001 traffic-broadcast/navigation-RDS references, which are the closest-technical-field art for a claim whose novelty turns on prioritizing and broadcasting at a frequency determined by the priority rating.
• Docket caveat (explicit). I could not run paid dockets (Docket Navigator, Lexis) or a complete PTAB E2E/PTACTS wildcard search within this session; my conclusion rests on the ODP structured data plus public web results. If you need a belt-and-suspenders answer, run a PTAB E2E "patent number" search (https://ptab.uspto.gov) and a Docket Navigator PTAB filter for 8,046,162 before relying on the "zero" count in a filing.

Sources consulted: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8046162/en; https://patents.justia.com (patent record); RPX Insight docket (Traffic Information LLC v. American Honda Motor Co., 2:07-cv-00391, E.D. Tex. — unrelated patent-in-suit); PTAB/PTACTS public decisions surfaced by search (none referencing 8,046,162). No CAFC appeal exists to link because no PTAB proceeding exists to appeal from.

I'll research the assignment record for US 8046162 before writing anything. Let me run several targeted queries.

Let me cross-check for any later transfers, litigation, and the inventor's employer of record.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US 8,046,162 B2

"Data broadcast method for traffic information" · Honda Motor Co., Ltd. · Filed & priority 2005‑11‑04 · Granted 2011‑10‑25 · Status: Active, adjusted expiration 2028‑06‑16

Sourcing caveat up front. Google Patents legal events (the authoritative text supplied for this analysis) expose exactly one reassignment entry, and they do not print the reel/frame number or the correspondent of record. The USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov) is an interactive search UI that I could not query programmatically, so I have no reel/frame number and no correspondent name for this patent. I have deliberately left those fields marked "not retrieved" rather than guess. Everything below that is not directly in the patent text or the Google Patents legal-events list is labelled as inference.

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Inventors

Unusual-pattern check: None. A single named inventor is unremarkable here. There is no evidence of inventor departure or of a subsequent inventor-side transfer — the inventorship line was never reassigned, and no third party appears on any register. The patent is one node in a larger Honda-internal navigation/telematics family: it incorporates by reference Honda's own application Ser. No. 11/232,311 ("Method and System for Broadcasting Data Messages to a Vehicle," filed 2005‑09‑20) and sits alongside other Honda-owned navigation patents (e.g., US 7,680,596; US 7,949,330). That is the signature of a corporate portfolio, not a liquidation.

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Original assignee

Honda Motor Co., Ltd., 1‑1, Minami-Aoyama 2‑chome, Minato‑ku, Tokyo 107‑8556, JP.

• Entity type / business: Publicly traded global automaker (TSE/NYSE: HMC). Primary line of business is design, manufacture and sale of automobiles, motorcycles, power equipment and related mobility services — i.e., an operating industrial company, not a licensing vehicle.
• Product embodiment: The claims are directed to a broadcast infrastructure — an information center that prioritises traffic messages (by road class and by relevance to the vehicle's active route) and a relay section that broadcasts higher-priority messages more frequently. Honda's in-vehicle navigation units of the relevant era shipped with satellite/XM NavTraffic-capable traffic reception, and Honda is the assignee of the surrounding navigation family. Whether a specific shipping Honda product reads on each claim limitation is not established by any source I reached; treat "ships a product embodying the claims" as supported in the general sense (an operating automaker with navigation products) and unproven in the limitation-by-limitation sense.
• Current status: Operating — no bankruptcy, dissolution, or acquisition of Honda Motor Co., Ltd. has occurred. Honda remains the assignee of record on the U.S. patent and on all three family members (EP1783718B1, DE602006007786D1, and the U.S. case). The EP member lapsed for non-payment of renewal fees (last renewal 2014‑08‑27, 9th year; ceased/not‑in‑force thereafter) — that is a maintenance decision on a foreign counterpart, not an ownership event, and it does not touch the U.S. chain.

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Assignment timeline

Recorded assignments on US 11/266,879 / US 8,046,162: exactly one.

• 2005‑11‑04 (executed) / recorded 2005‑11‑04 — Reel/Frame not retrieved (see caveat above)
  • Conveyance: Assignment (recorded as ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST — SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)
  • Assignor: NONAKA, RYOICHI (sole inventor)
  • Assignee: HONDA MOTOR CO., LTD. (Tokyo, JP)
  • Correspondent: Not retrievable from the sources available to me. The Google Patents legal-events feed does not expose a correspondent, and I did not query the Assignment Center. One incidental datapoint, explicitly not attributed to this patent: two other Honda applications from the same period list attorney agents — Michael S. Lee, Plumsea Law Group, Bethesda MD (PCT/US2004/043300) and Mori & Ward, LLP, Alexandria VA (US 2008/0065654). Those are different matters and must not be treated as the correspondent of record here.
  • Context: Initial assignment of inventor rights to the corporate employer at filing. This is the routine in-house recordation that accompanies a corporate filing; it is not a transfer to a third party, not a securitisation, and not a fire-sale.

No further recorded assignments follow — in either direction. Specifically, there is no assignment to an "IP Holdings / Licensing / Ventures" entity, no security agreement, no merger or change-of-name recordation, and no transfer to any entity appearing on the RPX / Unified Patents / Patent Progress high-frequency-plaintiff lists. Corroborating this on the family level: the UK IPO, INPI (France) and Lithuanian VPB registers for EP1783718B1 all still list HONDA MOTOR CO., LTD. as proprietor/owner through lapse, and the U.S. patent's current assignee per its own record is Honda. That is a single, uninterrupted 20-year ownership chain.

If the Assignment Center returns records I could not see (e.g., a later security interest or a post-2011 transfer), the reel/frame for any such entry should be read directly from the Assignment Center results for "8046162" before any of the negative findings below are relied on. My negative findings are limited to what the supplied authoritative text and the accessible registers show.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 8046162
    2005 : Filed by Honda Motor Co Ltd
         : Inventor assignment recorded to Honda
    2006 : EP and DE family applications filed
    2007 : US pre-grant publication
    2011 : Patent granted to Honda
    2028 : Adjusted expiration

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

Aggregate signal count: zero strong, zero weak, neither corroborated nor rebutted for #3 (single-link chain, correspondent unavailable).

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Verdict

Insufficient data — under this rubric's own definition, i.e. "only the original assignment." That is literally the record: the sole recorded conveyance is the 2005‑11‑04 inventor→Honda assignment, with no reel/frame or correspondent retrievable from the authoritative text supplied to me.

The substantive conclusion that follows from that thin record is the opposite of an NPE story, and should be recorded as such: US 8,046,162 has never left Honda Motor Co., Ltd. (assignee of record since filing; corroborated for the family by the UK IPO, INPI and VPB registers for EP1783718B1, all still naming Honda as proprietor). There is no shell-entity transfer, no known asserter, no cascading chain, no pre-litigation transfer, no bankruptcy sale, no privateering and no defensive-aggregator endpoint. Had the rubric offered "operating company, never asserted" as its own bucket, that would be the more informative label; "Operating-company assertion" is not available as a call because no infringement suit naming this patent was found, and "Defensive / non-asserting" is not available because Honda is not a defensive aggregator.

Verify at:

• USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search 8046162; capture reel/frame, correspondent, execution and recording dates)
• Google Patents legal events — https://patents.google.com/patent/US8046162/en#legal-events
• Family registers — https://www.search-for-intellectual-property.service.gov.uk/EP1783718 and https://data.inpi.fr/brevets/EP1783718

I'll research US patent 8046162 and its cited prior art. Let me start with several searches.

Let me research the key cited references to build accurate citations and relevance analysis.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 8,046,162 B2

1. Identification of the patent (literal control)

Do-not-confuse note (per your instruction): my searches returned a different Honda patent, US 8,046,166 B2 ("Method and System for Traffic Management…" − user display), and also US 8,121,777 (weather/drive-times broadcast). These are not US 8,046,162 and are excluded from the analysis below.

Governing law: filed 2005-11-04, so pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. §§ 102/103 apply. Anticipation under §102 requires a single reference disclosing every element "arranged as in the claim."

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2. The claims that must be met (operative, granted claims)

The granted claims (17 in total) differ materially from the published application claims. The independent claims are:

Claim 1 (system): information center that generates/prioritizes broadcast messages regarding traffic data for a plurality of roads and sends them from a remote location to a vehicle traveling on a current route to a destination point; a database containing information about the vehicle's current route; center assigns priority rating based on the route information; center sends each message at a frequency determined by the priority rating, and higher-priority messages are sent more frequently.

Claim 11 (method): retrieving vehicle-route information from a database; generating a broadcast message with traffic data; assigning a priority rating based on the route information; sending the message at a frequency determined by the priority rating; higher-priority → more frequently.

Key dependent claims: 2–3 road type (major/medium/minor); 4/13 whether the road is on the route; 5/12 server + generator application; 6/7 one-to-many / satellite radio; 8/17 filter data + priority + traffic data; 9/10/15/16 proximity of traffic data to a road on the vehicle's route.

The unusual element is the center-side, route-personalized priority→broadcast-frequency linkage. Most cited art is selection/sorting/display art, not frequency-of-broadcast art.

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3. Methodological caveat (read before relying)

The granted patent lists "Citations (163)" and, in a second rendering, "Patent Citations (179)" — a very large set, including many compression/coding references cited only because of the incorporated application Ser. No. 11/232,311. I do not represent that I individually re-verified all ~163–179 records against USPTO full text in this pass. Below I give detailed entries for the most relevant references (Tier 1 and Tier 2), then grouped coverage of the remainder (Tier 3). Where a characterization rests on title-level information rather than full text I say so. Dates are taken from the patent's own citation table.

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4. TIER 1 — Most relevant prior art (detailed)

(1) US 6,266,607 B1 — Mannesmann AG

• Full citation: US 6,266,607 B1, "Process for selecting the traffic information transmitted by a traffic information center which concerns a route of a vehicle equipped with a terminal in a road network," Mannesmann AG. Priority 1996-12-16; granted 2001-07-24. (EP 0 944 893 B1; WO1998027527A1.)
• Description: Determines a route as path points between start and destination; defines a zone/corridor between path points; selects traffic info whose location falls in the zone as relevant and outside as irrelevant.
• Potential §102 relevance: Strongest single reference for the "route membership" concepts of claims 4 and 13 and, if the corridor test is read as a proximity measure, claims 9/15. It does not disclose assigning a priority rating at the center and does not disclose broadcast frequency selection — so it does not anticipate independent claims 1 or 11 standing alone.

(2) US 2001/0001848 A1 — Oshizawa

• Full citation: US 2001/0001848 A1, "Vehicle navigation system providing traffic advisories based on traffic information and learned route," Hidekazu Oshizawa. Priority 1998-06-25; published 2001-05-24.
• Description: Issues traffic advisories keyed to the driver's learned/typical route.
• Potential §102 relevance: Directly addresses route-based prioritization of traffic information → claims 1, 4, 11, 13. Same gap as (1): no center-side frequency-of-broadcast control.

(3) US 6,266,608 B1 — Nokia Mobile Phones

• Full citation: US 6,266,608 B1, "Method and apparatus for the selection of traffic information for a motor vehicle," Nokia Mobile Phones Ltd. (DE 19847849 priority). Priority 1998-10-16; granted 2001-07-24.
• Description: Filters traffic information to a geographic area (circle or "tube"/keyhole along the direction of travel) derived from the vehicle's movement profile (speed/heading), dynamically.
• Potential §102 relevance: Claims 4/13 (area/route filtering) and claims 9/15 (proximity/direction). Filtering/selection only; no frequency control.

(4) US 2002/0077741 A1 — Hanebrink

• Full citation: US 2002/0077741 A1, "Method for outputting traffic information in a motor vehicle," Thomas Hanebrink (Bochum). Priority 1999-03-01; published 2002-06-20. (Same family as EP 1 033 692; divisional US 7,193,528.)
• Description: Stores traffic messages with position; computes distance from vehicle position, sorts messages by distance, outputs nearest first; forms a "local relevance factor" from a direction factor + distance and outputs a message only if it exceeds a threshold; suppresses opposite-direction messages.
• Potential §102 relevance: The closest art for the proximity/priority-ordering features → claims 9, 10, 15, 16, and arguably the "prioritize" step of claims 1/11. It sorts for output at the vehicle, not by broadcast frequency at the center — so it does not anticipate claims 1/11 in full.

(5) DE 10 2004 017 091 A1 — Audi AG

• Full citation: DE 10 2004 017 091 A1 (granted as DE102004017091B4), "Method for operating a navigation system for a motor vehicle," Audi AG. Priority/filed 2004-04-07; published 2005-10-27.
• Description: Traffic messages (3,4) are automatically sorted into two sub-areas of an output list — hierarchically by local relevance in the first (relative to the computed route when guidance is active, else the currently traveled road) and by content relevance in the second — and output visually/acoustically, with distance-limited relevance.
• Potential §102 relevance: Highly relevant to claims 2, 4, 9, 13, 15 and to the general "prioritize traffic information by relevance" concept. Published 8 days before the 2005-11-04 filing, so it is available as §102(a)/(e)-type art (not §102(b)). It concerns output-list sorting, not transmission frequency.

(6) US 6,590,507 B2 — HRL Laboratories

• Full citation: US 6,590,507 B2, "Method and system for providing personalized traffic alerts," HRL Laboratories, LLC. Priority 2001-03-05; granted 2003-07-08.
• Description: Generates personalized traffic alerts (route/user-preference based).
• Potential §102 relevance: Claims 1, 11 (personalized, route-linked traffic information); no frequency-control teaching.

(7) US 6,615,130 B2 — Makor Issues and Rights Ltd.

• Full citation: US 6,615,130 B2, "Real time vehicle guidance and traffic forecasting system." Priority 2000-03-17; granted 2003-09-02.
• Description: Real-time traffic-based vehicle guidance/forecasting.
• Potential §102 relevance: Background for claims 1/11 (traffic-condition messages to a vehicle on a route). Not a frequency-of-broadcast reference.

(8) US 6,539,302 B1 — Navigation Technologies Corp.

• Full citation: US 6,539,302 B1, "Method, system, and article of manufacture for providing notification of traffic conditions." Priority 2000-09-06; granted 2003-03-25.
• Description: Notifies a user of traffic conditions (route-relevant).
• Potential §102 relevance: Claims 1/11 (notification of route-relevant traffic). Selection/notification, not broadcast-frequency.

(9) US 2004/0068364 A1 — Wei Zhao

• Full citation: US 2004/0068364 A1, "Automated location-intelligent traffic notification service systems and methods," Wei Zhao. Priority 2001-12-06; published 2004-04-08.
• Description: Automated, location-intelligent traffic notification to mobile users.
• Potential §102 relevance: General architecture of claims 1/11; again no priority→frequency teaching. (Note: this document later cites US 8,046,162 as a cited-by, confirming family overlap of interest, but it predates 2005-11-04.)

(10) US 6,785,551 B1 — Ford Motor Company

• Full citation: US 6,785,551 B1, "Method of providing dynamic regionally relevant data to a mobile environment." Priority 2000-04-07; granted 2004-08-31.
• Description: Delivers dynamically, regionally relevant data to mobile units.
• Potential §102 relevance: Claims 6/7 (one-to-many/regional broadcast of relevant data). Not priority-based frequency.

(11) US 6,529,143 B2 — Nokia (Information retrieval system)

• Full citation: US 6,529,143 B2, "Information retrieval system," Nokia Mobile Phones Ltd. Priority 1998-10-23; granted 2003-03-04.
• Potential §102 relevance: Retrieval/relevance filtering of information to mobile terminals — background for claims 1/11.

(12) US 6,522,250 B1 — The MITRE Corporation

• Full citation: US 6,522,250 B1, "Movement history based selective distribution of generally broadcast information." Priority 2001-08-14; granted 2003-02-18. (See also sibling US 5,636,245 A, "Location based selective distribution of generally broadcast information," priority 1994-08-10, granted 1997-06-03.)
• Potential §102 relevance: Selective distribution of broadcast information based on the recipient's movement history — relevant to claims 1/11 and to claim 6 (one-to-many distribution), though addressing content selection rather than frequency.

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5. TIER 2 — Also relevant (route-, distance-, and destination-based traffic handling)

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6. TIER 3 — Remaining citations, grouped (title-level characterization)

These are in the citation list but are farther from the claimed subject matter. Grouped per your request, with dates from the patent's table:

A. Broadcast/message-addressing & targeting architecture (relevant to claims 6–8): US 5,639,931 A (IBM, 1994-06-02/1997-06-03 — compression, but also messaging); US 2003/0097477 A1 (Gateway, 2001-11-16/2003-05-22 — "Vehicle based intelligent network interactivity"); US 2004/0024753 A1 (Chane, 2001-11-27/2004-02-05 — "Broadcast database"); US 2004/0203630 A1 (Wang, 2002-03-15/2004-10-14 — targeting service delivery to mobile devices); US 2004/0208204 A1 (Crinon, 2003-04-21/2004-10-21 — "managing a data carousel"); US 2005/0137790 A1 (Aisin AW, 2003-12-19/2005-06-23); US 2005/0043060 A1 (Wireless Agents LLC, 2000-04-04/2005-02-24 — scheduling presentation of digital content); US 2004/0198217 A1 (Chen Lee, 2002-05-02/2004-10-07 — follow-me broadcast reception).

B. Traffic/road-type coding and receiver-side handling: US 4,907,159 A (Philips, 1987-05-09/1990-03-06); US 5,182,555 A (Farradyne, 1990-07-26/1993-01-26); US 5,206,641 A (Way To Go, 1990-11-05/1993-04-27); US 5,635,924 A (Loral, 1996-03-29/1997-06-03 — "Travel route information monitor"); US 5,864,? US 5,864,305 A (Volvo, above); US 6,397,067 B1 (Sumitomo Electric, 1999-07-07/2002-05-28 — roadside transmitter); US 6,834,? US 6,836,667 B1 (Lucent, 2000-09-19/2004-12-28 — location-based messages). Of note: the search surfaced a related Philips road-type reference, US 6,067,501 ("…selection…in dependence on a type of road…" — EP 0 789 343), which supports the road-type concepts of claims 2–3, but that document is not in US 8,046,162's own citation list, so I flag it as an additional search lead rather than a citation of record.

C. Compression / data-encoding (background; cited largely via incorporated application 11/232,311): US 5,323,155 A (IBM); US 5,396,228 A (Mobile Telecom. Tech.); US 5,635,931 A (IBM); US 5,953,503 A (DEC); US 6,088,699 A (IBM); US 6,453,329 B1 (Dodgen); US 2002/0058501 A1 (Hannu); US 2002/0059462 A1 (Hannu); US 2003/0009595 A1 (Collins).

D. Weather / non-traffic broadcast: US 2002/0067289 A1 (Smith — vehicle-centric weather prediction); US 2003/0169182 A1 (Wilhelm — position-based weather alert); US 6,823,263 B1 (Weather Central); US 2004/0080430 A1 (Videtich — severe weather); US 2005/0027449 A1 (Univ. of North Dakota — WINEMS); US 5,999,882 A (Sterling Software — weather along travel route).

E. Header/message-format & display utilities: US 5,921,? US 5,926,108 P? (Sony — movie information pager); US 5,874,? ; US 6,700,? ; US 2004/0249565 A1 (Park, 2003-06-03/2004-12-09); US 2005/0015199 A1 (Thales); US 2005/0043880 A1 (Hitachi); US 2005/0222760 A1 (Honda, 2004-04-06/2005-10-06); US 2004/0204821 A1 (Tu — POI extraction/sorting).

F. Other vehicle/nav foundational: US 5,862,510 A (Mitsubishi); US 5,892,463 A (Mitsubishi Denki); US 6,078,865 A (Xanavi); US 6,085,146 A (Sony); US 6,208,932 B1 (Mazda); US 6,208,935 B1 (Hitachi); US 6,356,? US 6,351,709 B2; US 6,381,533 B1 (NavTech); US 6,480,145 B2 (Sony); US 6,697,633 B1 (Northrop); US 7,124,023 B2 (PARC — traffic flow data collection agents, 2003-12-12/2006-10-17); US 7,680,596 B2 (Honda, 2004-04-06/2010-03-16); EP 1 276 088 B1 (Bosch, 2001-07-14/2010-09-29). The remaining JP/KR/NPL references (JP2000112978A, JP2000293788A, JP2001168743A, JP2003122785A, and the compression/standards non-patent literature) are technical background.

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7. §102 vs §103 bottom line per independent claim

Summary: No single cited reference appears to anticipate independent claims 1 or 11, because the cited art teaches selecting, sorting, or displaying traffic information by route/relevance, but not an information center that sets the transmission frequency of each broadcast message as a function of a route-personalized priority rating. The dependent route/proximity claims (4, 9–10, 13–16) are the most vulnerable to §102; the remainder are best attacked under §103, typically by combining a route-selection reference (Mannesmann '607 / Oshizawa / Nokia '608 / Hanebrink / Audi '091) with a broadcast-scheduling or regional-broadcast reference (Ford '551, Lucent '894, Crinon '204).

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8. Caveats and recommended verification steps

1. Source basis: I relied on the Google Patents full text you supplied (authoritative for this task) plus confirmatory web results for US 6,266,607, US 6,266,608, DE 10 2004 017 091, and US 2005/0162284. The Google Patents page gives both "Citations (163)" and "Patent Citations (179)"; I did not independently reconcile that discrepancy or verify every record.
2. Do not treat the above as a legal conclusion. Anticipation requires element-by-element identity "arranged as in the claim"; the "potentially anticipates" tags above are analytical flags, and several are more properly §103 combinations. A formal invalidity opinion should be run by counsel against the file history (including any examiner citations marked "," which in this list include US 4,907,159 A, US 5,206,641 A, US 5,735,? / US 5,732,383 A, US 5,771,459 A, US 5,635,924 A, US 6,826,472 B1, US 6,978,206 B1, US 6,985,089 B2, US 6,990,407 B1, US 7,062,379 B2, US 7,124,023 B2, US 7,680,596 B2, and the US 2004/2005 U.S. publications with asterisks).
3. Family members are not prior art: EP 1 783 718 B1 and DE602006007786D1 are the same-family foreign counterparts of US 8,046,162 and should be excluded from any §102 analysis.
4. Cited-by art is not prior art: the references in the "Cited By (10)" table (Cellepathy, Volkswagen, Ford, Samsung, LG, Ampere, etc.) post-date the 2005-11-04 priority and merely cite US 8,046,162; they are useful only for claim-chart context, not as §102 art.
5. If you want a true one-row-per-reference deliverable covering all 163–179 records with individual §102 tags, I can produce it, but it will require another pass (and, for confident descriptions of the ~40 references I currently only have at title level, retrieval of each full text). Let me know and I'll proceed.

I'll ground the reference identities with targeted searches before building the obviousness analysis. (Note a small internal inconsistency I'll flag at the end: the task header says "April 26, 2026" while my operating date is 2026-09-30.)

Good — the Mannesmann, Omron, and Audi references are confirmed. Let me verify a few more references bearing on the frequency-of-broadcast and road-type-priority limitations.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent 8,046,162 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Note on the record: I'm building on the previously generated patent summary and will not restate it. Two housekeeping flags up front:

• Date inconsistency: the task header says "April 26, 2026," while my operating date is 2026‑09‑30. Neither date affects the analysis (the patent's critical date is 2005‑11‑04).
• Truncation: the "Citations" list on the supplied Google Patents page was truncated mid-list. I therefore treat the references below as on‑face prior art only where I could confirm them, and I distinguish those from supplemental references I located independently. I had no full text for several cited references (e.g., the Mitre selective-distribution patents, AT Road '576, HRL '507, Toyota 2003/0125866, Crinon '204); for those I reason from title/abstract only and say so.

Because application 11/266,879 was filed 2005‑11‑04, pre‑AIA § 103(a) governs, read through KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007). I also apply pre‑AIA § 103(c) (common ownership) — important here, see § 6 below.

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1. Level of ordinary skill (PHOSITA)

A person of ordinary skill at the 2005 critical date would have: a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering or computer science (or equivalent), plus roughly 2–4 years' experience in vehicle telematics, navigation systems, and/or one‑to‑many data broadcasting, and familiarity with map databases, route calculation, traffic‑message formats (e.g., RDS‑TMC/ALERT‑C), and broadcast bandwidth scheduling. This is a predictable, mature arts area (traffic data + wireless broadcast + data scheduling), which matters for the KSR "combination of known elements" analysis.

2. Element-by-element map (independent claims 1 and 11)

Note the drafting point flagged earlier: the specification's summary frames the invention as ordering ("first … before …") by road type, but the granted independent claims are tied to the vehicle's current route and to transmission frequency. The § 103 case must be built against the claims as issued, and the frequency element is the crux.

3. Grounds of rejection

Ground I — Claims 1, 11 (and 4, 13, 14, 17)

Primary: Omron '056 (or Volvo '305) in view of Mannesmann '607/'580, further in view of Harris '156 (or Crinon '204).

• Omron '056 supplies the broadcasting information center, its processing of collected traffic data, and retransmission "to vehicles again." Mannesmann '607 supplies the route-relevance selection — the very problem the '162 patent addresses — and Mannesmann '580 supplies the center-side route database (the center, not the vehicle, computes and holds the route).
• The only meaningful gap is that '607's relevance determination is largely a binary select/discard of in‑zone vs. out‑of‑zone information, whereas claim 1 requires a graded priority rating controlling send frequency. DE'091 and EP 1 033 692 bridge the "graded relevance" half (hierarchical sorting; relevance factors with thresholds); Harris '156 bridges the "priority→transmission rate" half.
• Harris '156 is on the face of the '162 patent and states expressly that prioritized data elements are allocated differing numbers of time slots so that "lower priority data can be transmitted at a lower transmission rate" while high-priority data keeps its rate. That is the claimed "more frequently / less frequently" behavior, applied to a bandwidth-limited broadcast.

Motivation: (i) Both Omron and the '162 patent's own background identify the problem — limited broadcast capacity versus a large volume of traffic data ("if all the traffic data were broadcast at once, it would take a long time to update"). (ii) It is a known technique (priority-based slot/rate allocation, Harris '156; carousel repetition, Crinon '204) applied to a known problem (timely refresh of traffic data), which KSR treats as obvious absent unexpected results. (iii) A PHOSITA seeking to keep route-relevant traffic data fresh in a one-to-many system would predictably refresh the most important data most often. (iv) The combination merely implements the pre-existing, well-known "broadcast according to priority" paradigm in the traffic context.

Ground II — Claims 9, 10, 15, 16 (proximity to the route)

Audi DE 102004017091 (+ EP 1 033 692 / EP 1 338 867) in view of Mannesmann '607.
DE'091 discloses automatic hierarchical sorting of traffic messages by local relevance, expressly tied, in the "route guidance active" mode, to the predefined route, and it is an on-face citation. EP 1 033 692 computes an "örtlicher Relevanzfaktor" from distance and suppresses messages below a threshold. A distance-to-route relevance ordering is squarely disclosed. Motivation: minimizing driver distraction (DE'091 ¶[0009]) — the same rationale the '162 patent's background invokes.

Ground III — Claims 2–3 (road type)

US 6,067,501 in view of DE'091 / Omron '056. US 6,067,501 selects traffic information "in dependence on a type of road." Combined with the content-relevance sorting of DE'091 and the ordinary skill-level knowledge of functional road classification (major/medium/minor, a decades-old traffic-engineering and RDS‑TMC ALERT‑C concept), the three-tier scheme is a predictable design choice. This is the weakest of the four grounds — see § 6.

Ground IV — Claim 7 (satellite radio network)

US 6,711,398 (Hughes) and/or US 6,636,721 (Mobile Satellite Ventures) in view of Omron '056. Satellite broadcast of digital data to mobile receivers was conventional by 2005 (the '162 specification itself names XM Radio). Simply substituting/adding a satellite one-to-many medium for the claimed broadcast medium is the classic "use of a known technique to improve a similar device" rationale (MPEP 2143(A)(C)).

Ground V — Claims 5 and 12 (server with a generator application)

Omron '056 / Mannesmann '580 + KSR. Generating, converting to broadcast format, timing the send, and transmitting are the ordinary, pre-existing functions of a traffic information center; implementing them as a "server having a broadcast data message generator application executing thereon" is routine automation on a general-purpose computer and is obvious under KSR and MPEP 2143(A)(D).

4. Consolidated motivation to combine (KSR / MPEP 2143)

1. Common problem, finite solutions (KSR; MPEP 2143(A)(E)): every reference addresses the same problem — delivering only timely, relevant traffic information within a fixed bandwidth to moving vehicles. The '162 background itself concedes the prior art delivered "the same traffic information … to many or all vehicles," inundating users.
2. Known technique improving a known device (MPEP 2143(A)(C)): priority‑graded transmission (Harris '156; carousel repetition, Crinon '204) applied to a traffic broadcast center.
3. Design incentives / market forces (KSR): bandwidth in satellite/radio broadcast is expensive and scarce; the value of traffic data decays with age; engineers are incentivized to refresh the highest-value data most often.
4. "Obvious to try" (KSR; MPEP 2143(A)(E)): given a menu of known relevance criteria (on-route membership, proximity, road class — all in the art), ranking them in a hierarchy and cycling the broadcast accordingly is a finite, predictable set of solutions with a reasonable expectation of success.
5. Ordinary creativity, not invention: the claimed encoding (2-bit 11/10/01/00) is expressly "exemplary" in the specification and is not claimed; the claimed subject matter reduces to applying an administrative scheduling rule to known data.

5. Where the patentee's best arguments lie (and responses)

• "The center must assign priority from a route database at the center; '607 does its relevance check in the terminal." Mannesmann '607's own DE claim 4 and the companion '580 expressly contemplate route calculation and route storage in the central station, so the "database … in communication with the information center" is disclosed. Response: argument fails.
• "The art filters or sorts for display; it does not modulate broadcast repetition rate." This is the strongest argument, because the '162 claims are narrower than its summary (frequency, not ordering). But Harris '156 — on the face of the patent — expressly maps priority to transmission rate/time slots in a bandwidth-constrained broadcast, and Crinon '204 addresses carousel scheduling. Response: argument likely fails, but this is where an IPR would be won or lost.
• "No motivation to combine a tactical telemetry reference (Harris) with traffic broadcasting." Weak: the combination is not of physical structures but of the universal problem of priority scheduling in a bandwidth-limited broadcast, and the traffic context supplies the need to keep safety-relevant data fresh. KSR permits combination where the references address the same problem.
• Claim 3's three-tier specificity. Genuinely narrower and the best candidate for survival, but only if the art lacks road-class-as-priority. US 6,067,501 (road type affects selection) plus standard functional classification makes even this vulnerable. Response: at minimum a close question; keep it as a fallback.

6. An important caveat on the incorporated reference

The specification's filter-code (FCX) discussion incorporates U.S. application Ser. No. 11/232,311 ("Method and System for Broadcasting Data Messages to a Vehicle," filed 2005‑09‑20) — a Honda application, as is the '162 patent itself. Under pre‑AIA § 103(c), subject matter qualifying as prior art only under § 102(e)/(f)/(g) and commonly owned at the time of invention is disqualified as § 103 prior art. If '311 qualifies solely as 102(e) art, it cannot be used in an obviousness rejection against the '162 claims. For claim 8/17's "filter data" element, a challenger must instead rely on non‑commonly‑owned art (e.g., Nokia '608, the Mitre selective-distribution patents).

7. Secondary considerations

I found no objective evidence in the record reachable to me of commercial success, licensing, copying, unexpected results, or long-felt-but-unmet need tied to the '162 claims. The forward citations (Cellepathy, Volkswagen, Ford) show the patent is noticed, but forward citation is not, by itself, evidence of non-obviousness under § 103.

8. Bottom line

Overall: the independent claims are, on this record, substantially likely to be held obvious. The single most important pivot is whether the priority→frequency limitation is met by US 2006/0062156 A1 / US 7,782,789 B2 (Harris), which is cited on the face of the '162 patent and expressly links priority to transmission rate. If a challenger must instead rely only on "sorting for display" references (Audi DE'091, EP 1 033 692), the case weakens materially because sorting is not scheduling.

Limitations of this analysis: (a) I could not read the full text of several on-face references (Mitre '250/'245, AT Road '576, HRL '507, Toyota 2003/0125866, Crinon '204), so their mapping rests on titles/abstracts; (b) the on-face citation list as supplied was truncated; (c) I have not reviewed the '162 prosecution history to see which art the examiner actually applied and why the claims were allowed — that history is essential before relying on any § 103 conclusion; (d) this is a technical prior-art analysis, not a legal opinion.

Sources: the authoritative patent page, https://patents.google.com/patent/[US8046162B2](/patent/US8046162B2)/en (cited references, claims, and specification quotes); Mannesmann US 6,266,607 text via http://www.everypatent.com/comp/pat6266607.html and EP 0 944 893 A1; Omron US 5,699,056 text via http://www.everypatent.com/comp/pat5699056.html; Audi DE 10 2004 017 091 A1/B4 via https://patents.google.com/patent/DE102004017091B4/en; Harris US 2006/0062156 A1 via https://patents.google.com/patent/US20060062156A1/en and US 7,782,789; the EP 1 783 718 A1 counterpart page, https://patents.google.com/patent/EP1783718A1/en.