![]() ![]() Toyota’s cautious and practical island-hopping path to full autonomy has at least two intermediate steps: (Even in a Prius, that would be something like 20 billion gallons of gasoline.) Pratt has said Toyota would want a trillion miles of test driving to be confident a fully autonomous car worked. Even with just a small fraction driving autonomously, Pratt envisions an “existential crisis” for Toyota and for the reputation of autonomous driving if only a handful of the self-driving vehicles suffered a component failure, or made a bad judgment that led to an accident, as the Google car did thinking a Silicon Valley city bus would yield the right of way. That’s 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) miles, perhaps 10 trillion miles counting all Toyotas on the road. Imagine they each drive 10,000 miles a year. Toyota builds 10 million cars and trucks a year. Odds don’t favor zero-accidents self driving for a huge automakerĪs Toyota sees it, the math doesn’t hold up for the world’s largest automaker to head straight to the highest level of self-driving. There Toyota announced the guardian-angel project, reiterated its long-term commitment to fully autonomous driving, and said Toyota will use three R&D facilities in the US, including a new facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Gill Pratt, CEO of Toyota Research Institute, said, “In the same way that antilock braking and emergency braking work, there is a virtual driver that is trying to make sure you don’t have an accident by temporarily taking control from you.” Pratt was speaking at an Nvidia industry conference last week in San Jose. ![]() Even a 10-second switchover might be nine seconds too long if the car can’t handle a dangerous situation. But as-needed assistive driving has more promise for the near future because of the challenge of switching quickly from fully autonomous to driver-back-in-control. Toyota will continue working on traditional, fully autonomous (Google- and Tesla-style) vehicles as well. Toyota sees big benefits from “guardian angel” autonomous driving: The driver is always in control until he or she messes up and a crash looms, and then the car takes over.
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