Toyota has some big plans in terms of driver aids and fully autonomous vehicle technology, integrating artificial intelligence and big data to improve vehicle safety.
A Reuters report states that this will be the central focus of the newly christened Toyota Research Institute (TRI) that, within the next 5 years, aims to implement sufficient in-car intelligence into common vehicles that is smart enough to anticipate and avoid potential accidents.
The research effort will see the Japanese automaker sink over $1 billion US dollars within the half-decade to realise this ambition, which is a goal it shares with rivals such as Volkswagen AG, Ford, and Volvo along with equally high profile and wealthy companies such outside the traditional motoring sphere such as Google.
CEO of the Toyota Research Institute, Gill Pratt, says: "Some of the things that are in car safety, which is a near-term priority, I'm very confident that we will have some advances come out during the next five years."
A timeframe as well as the scope for the technology itself has not been detailed. However, Toyota has more candidly mentioned that it would like the technology to be ready enough for public automated highway driving by the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.
"The intelligence of the car would figure out a plan for evasive action ... Essentially (it would) be like a guardian angel, pushing on the accelerators, pushing on the steering wheel, pushing on the brake in parallel with you."
Currently, autonomous driving technology allows a car to sense an oncoming object and then apply the brakes or even drive the car along highways – but typically within a single lane. The only exceptions so far is Tesla’s Autopilot system, Audi’s latest Piloted Driving system, and Volvo’s ‘Drive Me’ technology.
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