Toyota’s High Stakes Race for the World’s Safest Autonomous Vehicle

Imagine this is a horse race. Toyota is lined up with Waymo, Tesla, GM, Baidu, Audi/Huawei, and a host of others developing autonomous vehicle (AV) technology. Who do you think wins? Let me rephrase that question. Who do you think will develop the safest and most road-ready AV?

The winner of the AV race will be the one whose vehicle proves to be the safest. When you have an AI robot that represents the peak of mankind’s technological prowess driving around with lives in its hands, as well as tons of expensive tech onboard, it’s not an overstatement to say safety is priority number one.

To begin, autonomous vehicles seek to improve safety by employing the following:

• Sense-plan-act robotic paradigm: Multiple AV sensors send sensory data looping through systems at varying speeds.
• Advanced maps: An AV uses highly detailed maps and can get map updates via internet.
• Light detection and ranging: Lidar provides the system with spatial data on objects based on how long it takes light to reflect back.
• V2V communication: For maximum safety, AVs should be able to communicate road condition and traffic data with each other even if they’re not part of the same fleet.

The AV that wins will have the best sensors and the best strategy for using sensory data to drive safely.

Spoiler alert: If the data on vehicle maintenance costs are any indication, Toyota will emerge at the forefront of AVs. At an average of $5,500 over 10 years, Toyota cars cost the least to maintain. Toyota’s other brands Scion and Lexus come in second and third.

In other words, Toyota’s onboard computers malfunction less than the rest, and Toyota’s manufacturing marries the engine to the computer with exceptional skill. The Prius, a hybrid model that earns accolades as the most reliable car on the road, is proof that a high-tech concept can function impeccably in the real world.

Toyota’s AV demo video shows a vehicle operating in two different modes: Chauffeur and Guardian. In Chauffeur mode, the self-driving vehicle is able to sense random events and react to them while the human in the passenger seat sits back and watches. The car swerves smoothly around hay bales that fall from the back of a pickup, and then avoids a truck stalled in the road, even as another car is flanking it in its blindspot. To do this, Toyota’s AV has to slow down, wait for the other car to go ahead, and change lanes to maneuver past the stalled truck.

In Guardian mode, the vehicle takes over when the driver seems to fall asleep. To do this, the vehicle employs a camera in the dashboard that can see through sunglasses. The camera is constantly relaying data to the computer, which uses facial feature analysis to determine whether the driver is sleeping. When the driver wakes up, the computer prompts him to resume control of the vehicle.

Toyota Connected North America can harvest over 7 million data-points from Toyota’s connected cars every day. Each car has 500 sensors from which Connected’s programmers upload data every 200 milliseconds. These data give Connected valuable information on driver behavior, which it uses to train a supersmart web browser on wheels, as Bloomberg Businessweek puts it.

Bloomberg notes that Toyota’s AV concept is not actually driverless. Does that disqualify Toyota from the AV race? Not exactly.

The car can drive itself while in Chauffeur mode, however there’s still a driver in the captain’s chair. Come the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, though, there won’t be. In a multi-headed partnership with Amazon, Uber, Pizza Hut, Mazda, and a Chinese ride-hailing service called Didi Chuxing, Toyota will roll out e-Palette. During the Olympics, people in Tokyo will be able to have an e-Palette van deliver products, packages, and food to them, or they could turn the van into a mobile hotel room or emergency command center.

Ultimately, even though the carmaker has the ability to go fully autonomous, Toyota wants to tap into a target audience more intrigued by semi-autonomous vehicles. A Gartner survey found that 55 percent of people are scared of riding in a fully autonomous vehicle, while 70 percent are confident they’d step into a semi-autonomous ride.

Bloomberg points out that the global mobility market could amount to as much as $750 billion by 2030. Toyota, the world’s most valuable car company with a market capitalization of $200 billion, has a lot to lose if it doesn’t become more like an IT company that creates autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles. Toyota’s quest comes at a moment when California has given Waymo the go-ahead to test driverless vehicles without a backup driver.

If driverless is the future, Waymo is ahead of Toyota, but if semi-driverless is the future, Toyota looks to have jumpstart on the competition.