Toyota reveals plans to take on big tech with self-driving vehicles
Toyota has devised a plan to take on big tech. The Japanese car making giant recently unveiled its Woven Planet research group, which is set to develop driverless and connected cars.
This move represents a giant change of direction for the car maker, which has previously spurned development of autonomous car tech in comparison to companies such as Mercedes-Benz and VW that have invested heavily.
Tesla is also a big time developer of autonomous car tech, with its controversial Autopilot and Full Self-Driving mode.
Toyota said it would unveil a fully self-driving prototype in the near future but didn’t give any further details.
Woven Planet is led by ex-Google roboticist James Kuffner, who said that Toyota has a distinct advantage in developing electric cars because of the amount of data they can collect from the tens of millions of Toyotas on the road around the globe.
Toyota is now on a collision course with some of tech’s biggest names.
Apple has recently been linked to Hyundai Motor Group to build its own vehicles. It is believed from reports that Apple would provide the software – including autonomous driving tech – and Hyundai would bring its manufacturing expertise to the partnership.
Amazon has made its desire for autonomous vehicles well known as it wants to eventually turn its fleet of delivery vans into autonomous vehicles.
At last year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Sony announced plans to develop a car and earlier this month it showed off a prototype vehicle undergoing testing.
Source: driven.co.nz
Dawn N. McCoy is from San Diego and has always been interested in amazing new things and that led her to geekdom. Dawn researches and reports on medical advances. She also enjoys her scooter and Youtube .
