Trace EV battery patents from 2020 to 2024 and you watch a quiet shift. Early grants often treat cooling as a system you add to a pack. By 2024, the pack is the cooling system — the housing, the structure, the cooling channels, and the safety venting are designed together as one thing. A 2024 Bosch grant is a clean example of that integrated mindset, where you cannot separate the box from how it manages heat.
The record: on October 1, 2024, Robert Bosch GmbH was granted US12107247B2, a “Battery pack with thermal management system.” The breadth of CPC classes is the point: cooling classes (H01M 10/6556, 10/613, 10/643, 10/6568) sit alongside pack-structure and housing classes (H01M 50/204, 50/213, 50/271, 50/291) and a contact/connection class (50/507). The patent spans the whole pack as an integrated object.
Here is what integration means concretely. In a co-designed pack, the cooling channels are part of the structural members; the housing that gives the pack rigidity also routes coolant; the venting that protects against a thermal event is built into the same enclosure. Nothing is bolted on as an afterthought. The thermal path, the load path, and the safety path share the same physical structure, which saves weight and space and improves all three.
Why has the field converged on this? Because a bolted-on cooler is heavier, leakier, and less effective than cooling that is part of the structure. As packs got larger and charge rates climbed, the inefficiencies of treating thermal as separate became unaffordable. The integrated pack is the answer the industry arrived at: one structure that holds the cells, carries the loads, moves the heat, and contains a failure.
Trace it to the product and the significance is maturity. A 2024 integrated-pack grant from a major tier-1 supplier signals that EV battery engineering has settled into a mature pattern — the pack as a co-designed thermal-structural-safety system. The wild experimentation of early EVs has given way to a consensus architecture, refined in details like the exact arrangement of cooling, structure, and venting that a patent like this claims.
The caveat: a granted integrated-pack design is one specific arrangement, not the only way, and “integrated” describes an approach, not a performance guarantee. But the throughline across years of these grants is real and worth naming. Follow the kilowatt-hours and you find heat at every step; by 2024, the pack itself has become the primary tool for managing it. A Bosch grant from that year shows the cooling structure with cells in it — which is what a modern EV pack has become.