Treat announced spend as announced and committed spend as committed — and treat a patent as neither. On December 29, 2020, GM was granted US10875420B2, "Full-service charging station for an electric vehicle." The CPC mix — B60L 53/65 and 53/62 (charging scheduling and operation), B60R 25/24 (vehicle access) and G05D 1/0276 (autonomous positioning) — describes an automated station, not just a plug.An offtake deal is a balance-sheet event; a granted patent is a capitalized-R&D event. This grant tells you GM was, in 2020, investing engineering in the automation of charging and service — the kind of infrastructure layer that later turns into capex if the company decides to build it. The patent is the upstream artifact in that decision.The honest read is that intent is not investment. A charging-station patent does not commit a dollar; it documents where engineering attention went. The capital question is answered by the property-plant-and-equipment and capex lines in the filings, not by the patent office.For the ledger reader, the move is to file this under direction, then watch the cash-flow statement for confirmation. The primary source for any capex claim is GM's SEC filing on sec.gov, with EdgarBeast as the index that surfaces it; the PatentBear record is the leading signal.Read it as a 2020 capital-direction tell. Whether GM actually pointed money at full-service charging is a question the later filings settle — the grant only tells you the engineering was pointed there first.