The independent claim is where the value lives, and in a battery patent the value is usually in how structure and safety are made inseparable. Rivian's grant US12651813B2, "Systems and methods for battery architecture" (issued June 9, 2026), carries a CPC list that tells the story before you read a single claim: H01M 50/581 (electric connections within a cell housing), H01M 10/425 (battery management for specific applications), and crucially B60L 3/0046 and B60L 3/04 — the electric-propulsion codes for preventing damage to components and for disconnecting a vehicle from its supply on a fault.
Separate the structural claim from the safety claim and you see the design intent. H01M 50/581 is about the physical architecture — how cells connect inside the housing. The B60L 3 codes are about what happens when something goes wrong — isolating the pack, cutting the supply, protecting the rest of the vehicle. A pack patent that classifies into both is claiming an architecture in which the safety behavior is a property of the structure, not a separate bolt-on circuit.
This is novel where the integration is novel, and boilerplate where it is not. Plenty of prior art covers battery disconnection on fault, and plenty covers cell-housing connections. The defensible position in this grant is the specific combination — the way this particular architecture achieves the fault isolation — which the independent claim defines and the dependent claims fence in. Reading the abstract alone would tempt you to say "Rivian patented battery safety," which is exactly the overreach a claims teardown exists to prevent.
Why does an EV maker file structural-plus-safety battery IP rather than chemistry IP? Because the chemistry is increasingly bought from cell suppliers, while the pack architecture — how a manufacturer assembles, manages, and protects those cells — is where a vehicle company can still differentiate and defend. The IP-strategy signal is that Rivian is protecting the integration layer it controls, not the cell chemistry it does not.
The inventor list reads like a pack-engineering team, and the assignee is Rivian IP Holdings, LLC — the entity that holds the company's patents. For portfolio watchers, a grant assigned to the IP-holding entity rather than the operating company is the normal pattern for a position a company intends to keep and potentially enforce.
For the B60L class specifically, this grant is a reminder that "electric propulsion" patents are not only about motors and inverters. The safety subclasses — B60L 3/00 and its children — are filling with pack-architecture claims, and tracking which assignees concentrate there tells you who is treating battery integration as defensible IP rather than commodity assembly.