Tokyo: Toyota Motor Corp has decided to draw a line under the current mania to come up with driverless cars.
It will not be putting in its considerable financial and R&D might into developing such vehicles. Instead, “Toyota’s vision for now and the future is to build cars with a driver in mind,” said Shoji Inagaki, General Manager at the company’s Vehicle Control System Development Division. “Cars built by us have to be driven by people.
“What we are doing is using our understanding of driverless technology to use them for on-board safety features ... and not as an end in itself. The way we see it is such technologies can be deployed to support a driver.”
The company taps into driverless tech from its Michigan-based R&D facility and also works closely with specialist institutions in Europe.
While Google is in the vanguard to make driverless cars a more widespread reality, other Silicon Valley giants too are looking to develop a presence in this space.
Automotive majors have been looking at what the technology can do, but have remained non-committal on projecting future commercial possibilities around it.
As Inagaki says it, “Driverless technology can be the 'second driver' on-board, but should never take precedence over the first, who has to be human. At the end of the day, cars are meant to be for human beings.”
