Two years after Thunder Power's series/parallel thermal claim, the reconfigurable-cooling idea shows up again — refined — in Ford's grant US11456497B2, "Electrified vehicle thermal management systems with combinable battery pack and electric drive component cooling circuits" (issued September 27, 2022). The independent claim's center is the combinability: a pack cooling loop and a drive-component cooling loop that can be joined or kept separate as conditions demand. The CPC — B60L 58/26, H01M 10/6568, B60K 11/02 — confirms it as a thermal-architecture claim.
The novelty is the on-demand combination, and the real invention is the valving and control that enable it. Separate loops let you cool the pack and the inverter at their own optimal temperatures; combining them lets you share heat-rejection capacity or move heat where it is useful, such as warming a cold pack with drive-component waste heat. A claim that ties the circuit topology to operating conditions reads on a concrete, manufacturable system.
On scope, the independent claim establishes the combinable-circuit concept; the dependents that specify when and how the loops combine are the moat. A dependent that conditions combination on a cold-start or fast-charge state is defensible because it reads on a specific control decision. As with most thermal patents, the breadth in the independent recitation is at prior-art risk — reconfigurable cooling is now a crowded class — so the durability sits in those conditioned dependents.
Ford holding this in September 2022 fits the broader pattern of incumbents racing to optimize EV thermal efficiency, where range and fast-charge capability both hinge on temperature control. Compared with the 2020 Thunder Power claim, Ford's adds the explicit pack-and-drive combination as the distinguishing structure. Read the claims, not the title: the substance is the controllable combination of loops, and the valving dependents are what hold up.