ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,580,880, issued on March 17, was assigned to VOLKSWAGEN AG (Wolfsburg, Germany).

"Messaging system with one-to-many communication" was invented by Robert Gibson (Bothell, Wash.), Jeffery Scherrer (Redmond, Wash.), Jason Ward (Buckeye, Ariz.), Sameer Nafdey (Bellvue, Wash.), Matthew Hartmann (Massapequa, N.Y.), Brandon Unkrur (Seattle), Filip Brachkov (St. Charles, Mo.) and Robert Allen (Lake Forest Park, Wash.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A messaging system is provided to communicate messages between computing devices. The computing devices can include vehicles and service computers. The messaging system includes nodes and virtual ent...