Toyota Aims to Make Self-Driving Cars by 2020
October 06 2015 - 9:50AM
Dow Jones News
TOKYO—Toyota Motor Corp. plans to make some of its cars fully
capable of self-driving on highways by around 2020, it said
Tuesday, accelerating the rollout of its autonomous-drive
technology and countering Silicon Valley rivals like Google
Inc.
Toyota used the term "automated driving" to describe its new
system, which allows vehicles to get on and off the highway and
change lanes without driver input. That was a shift from its past
approach, under which it preferred calling such technologies
"advanced driver support."
"We were afraid that by using the term 'automated driving,'
people would misunderstand that humans are not involved at all,"
said Masahiro Iwasaki, an engineer involved in the development of
the technology.
But rival auto makers and Silicon Valley players started to use
such terms frequently, and the world's biggest auto maker by unit
sales realized that it needed to market its technology differently,
Mr. Iwasaki said.
"Our goal remains the same—improving mobility and decreasing
accidents," he said.
Google's strategy of developing self-driving cars and
aggressively promoting its technology has frequently left Toyota
out of the limelight and created the impression that Silicon Valley
is ahead. Toyota officials say they don't think so, because the
company has been studying autonomous driving for two decades—since
before Google existed.
"We have spent a long time to develop the technology. We have
advantages and we want to maintain them as we push forward,"
Moritaka Yoshida, Toyota's chief safety executive, said Tuesday in
introducing the self-driving cars.
Toyota believes there are two routes in pursuing the technology,
Mr. Iwasaki said. The first is fully autonomous driving cars, which
companies like Toyota and Google are testing on U.S. streets. The
second category encompasses more reliable, semiautonomous
technologies that can be introduced to mass-market cars in the near
future.
The technology Toyota unveiled Tuesday fits into the latter
category.
A prototype car that carried reporters onto a highway in Tokyo
went into automatic driving mode when a driver pressed a button on
the steering wheel near the highway entrance. Without driver input,
the car drove onto the highway, switched lanes and exited via an
off-ramp.
When the car got off the highway, an announcement said the
automated mode was ending and urged the driver to take over
again.
The Lexus GS-based prototype car uses map data to determine
where it should run and when it should change lanes, Toyota
said.
It also has 12 sensors for capturing data—one camera behind the
front mirror, five radar devices that use radio waves to capture
the speed of other vehicles and six lasers that grasp the position
of objects around the car.
Toyota named the prototype car "Highway Teammate," emphasizing
that it is intended to help drivers, not replace them. Mr. Iwasaki
said the cost of the sensors must be reduced significantly to
introduce the technology in mass-market vehicles.
Last week, Toyota started selling vehicles with a device that
can communicate with other cars or traffic lights. That could allow
for smoother lane-control driving on the highway or help alert
drivers about the location of other cars. Toyota is set to
introduce the technology, which it calls ITS Connect, in the
redesigned Prius that will go on sale in Japan later this year, a
person knowledgeable about the matter said.
In September, the company said it would work with the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford on artificial
intelligence research, and it hired a former official from the
Pentagon's research arm studying autonomous driving.
Write to Yoko Kubota at yoko.kubota@wsj.com
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 06, 2015 09:35 ET (13:35 GMT)
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