Slice open a modern cordless drill battery and a Tesla battery pack side by side, and you’ll find the two share more engineering DNA than you’d expect. Both increasingly rely on a design trick called a tabless cylindrical cell – wiring the electrode directly to the battery’s terminal instead of routing current through a handful of thin metal tabs. That obscure slice of battery architecture just became the center of a federal lawsuit and a trade complaint that could reshape who’s allowed to sell lithium-ion cells in the United States.
On July 21, 2026, LG Energy Solution filed a patent infringement suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas against EVE Energy, a Shenzhen-listed battery manufacturer that ranks among the world’s ten largest suppliers of lithium-ion cells. The Korean battery maker didn’t stop there. A day later, Tulip Innovation, the Budapest-based licensing group that manages battery patents on behalf of LG Energy Solution and Panasonic Energy, filed a companion complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission, asking the agency to open a Section 337 investigation and block EVE Energy’s cells from entering the country entirely.
The suit doesn’t stop at EVE Energy’s factory gates. It also names Bosch, Koki Holdings (parent of HiKOKI and Metabo HPT), and entities tied to Chervon, the company behind EGO Power+, SKIL, and Flex, as downstream importers of finished products built around the accused cells. That detail makes this feel like a power tool story more than an EV story, and legally, it mostly is: Tulip Innovation’s own statement on the case says the action targets “extensive infringement in the U.S. power tool market.”
What’s Actually Patented Here
Five U.S. patents make up the dispute. Four cover cylindrical cell construction, including tabless designs, and one covers separator technology, the thin membrane that keeps a battery’s positive and negative electrodes from touching and short-circuiting. Tulip says its broader licensing portfolio, more than 5,000 patents across upwards of 1,500 patent families, also covers cell-safety features. Tabless construction matters because it lowers internal resistance and spreads heat more evenly across a cell, letting it deliver more current without overheating, useful whether you’re revving a cordless impact driver or flooring an EV. It’s the same underlying principle Tesla popularized with its 4680 cell format, though Tesla’s own tabless patents are separate from the ones LG Energy Solution and Panasonic are asserting here.
What an ITC Exclusion Order Would (and Wouldn’t) Do
None of this means EVE Energy’s cells are getting pulled off shelves next month. Filing an ITC complaint only starts the clock, the Commission still has to vote to formally institute an investigation, a step that hadn’t happened as of this writing. If it does open a case and eventually finds a violation under Section 337, the available remedies are an exclusion order, which stops the accused cells and any finished goods containing them from clearing U.S. customs, and potentially a cease-and-desist order, which would restrict sales of inventory already sitting in U.S. warehouses. The separate federal lawsuit in Texas runs on its own timeline and could produce damages or an injunction regardless of what the ITC decides. Cases like this routinely take a year or more before any remedy takes effect, and companies frequently settle long before a final ruling.
LG Energy Solution Has Done This Before
There’s already a template for how this could end. Tulip Innovation’s licensing campaign scored a win earlier this year when Sunwoda Electronic, another Chinese battery maker, agreed to license LG Energy Solution’s technology rather than keep fighting disputes in Germany and South Korea. Tulip chairman Giustino de Sanctis framed the EVE Energy case as more of the same enforcement push, saying the group remains committed to “addressing the proliferation of unlicensed lithium-ion battery products across various industries.” Translated out of press-release-speak: this is a licensing program working exactly as designed. File enough enforcement actions, and eventually it’s cheaper for a competitor to pay up than to keep fighting.
EVE Energy Isn’t Backing Down Yet
EVE Energy, for its part, isn’t rolling over. In a July 24 filing with the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the company said it hadn’t yet received formal legal documents from either the Texas court or the ITC and, based on its own internal review, believes it hasn’t infringed the patents in question. EVE says it holds more than 17,000 patent applications worldwide, over 3,000 of them related to cylindrical batteries, and plans to assemble a legal team to fight the case under U.S. procedure.
The Bigger Picture: Battery Patents as Quiet Trade Policy
Timing matters here. This filing lands in the middle of a broader U.S. reshuffling of how Washington treats Chinese-linked automotive and battery supply chains. Congress has been advancing a bill that would cap Chinese ownership stakes in automakers selling connected vehicles here, and regulators abroad have shown they’re willing to target specific hardware choices, like when China itself banned flush door handles as a safety hazard. Battery patent enforcement fits that same pattern, it’s a way to slow down unlicensed Chinese cell suppliers without waiting on a tariff bill to clear Congress.
The cell-safety patents buried in this dispute deserve a second look, too. Thermal runaway, the chain reaction that turns a damaged lithium-ion cell into a fire, remains the biggest liability question insurers and repair shops face any time a battery pack gets bent, flooded, or crushed, as anyone who watched a high-end shop go up in flames earlier this year can attest. Patents covering safety architecture aren’t just legal chess pieces; they can be the difference between a cell that vents gas safely and one that doesn’t.
What It Means for Your Garage, Eventually
None of this affects anyone who already owns a cordless drill or an EV this week. But it’s another data point in how expensive and contentious battery IP has become just as automakers recalculate their own EV math, GM, for instance, recently brought back gas-powered versions of the Cadillac XT6 and CT5 rather than force cell costs it couldn’t yet justify. Every dollar added to a battery’s legal overhead eventually shows up somewhere: a higher cell price, a licensing fee baked into a tool’s MSRP, or a supplier quietly switching who it buys cells from.
For now, watch the ITC’s docket rather than your driveway. If the Commission institutes a formal investigation, that’s the signal this graduates from a dispute between battery executives into something with real supply-chain teeth. Until then, EVE Energy keeps shipping cells, Bosch and Chervon keep selling tools, and Tulip Innovation keeps building leverage toward a settlement check that, if the Sunwoda case is any indication, was probably the goal all along.
About the Author
