Backbone of technology evolution in the modern era automobile industry: An analysis by the patents citation network

In the automobile industry, especially in its modern era, large amount of technologies have been generated to produce automobiles. The technological evolution in this industry is formed by complicated effects of the emergence of some milestone inventions and interaction, integration, and succession among diverse technologies. It's a big challenge to sort out crucial inventions and technologies progresses that mainly form this industry's technological evolution. We use patent citation data and apply network analytical techniques to reveal characteristics of the backbone in the automobile industry's technological evolution. We employ three algorithms respectively to explore the main path of the technological evolution, the most important subnetwork which outlines the main characteristics of the industry's technological evolution, and the most important technological inventions (act as authorities and hubs of the technological evolution) in the industry. Main results are reported in detail by tables, figures and interpretations to disclose the most influential technologically developing path, pivotal transfers in technological trajectories, and important technological convergences and divergences over time, of the modern era automobile industry.