•Uncovering the evolution of the new energy vehicle industry.•Predicting the technology trends of the new energy vehicle industry.•Using integrated methods of Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Vector Autoregression model. In the sustainable development context, the automotive industry is shifting towards new energy vehicles (NEVs) to reduce carbon emissions. China leads in NEVs production and technology but faces challenges in innovation capacity due to increasing market competition and technological demands. Consequently, to explore the situation of technology innovation of China’s NEVs, this paper delves into the technology changes in this field with the invention granted patents from 2000 to 2021, employing the basic patent-metrics method and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model for evolution analysis and vector autoregression (VAR) model for trend predictions. The research findings indicate that: (1) the patents pertaining to NEVs have experienced an average annual growth rate of 23%, with notable regional disparities in the spatial distribution of said patents. (2) Among the 8 key technology topics identified, battery equipment technology, brake control system technology, and supplying system technology emerge as the top three technology topics. (3) As NEVs progressively become more intelligent, there is an anticipated surge in interest regarding vehicle braking control technology over the ensuing five years.