Toyota To Spend $50 Million On Self-Driving Car Tech

An anonymous reader writes: Toyota is the latest automaker to see which way the wind is blowing; they've committed $50 million over the next five years to build research centers for self-driving car technology. They'll be working with both Stanford and MIT, and their immediate goal is to "eliminate traffic casualties." "Research at MIT will focus on 'advanced architectures' that will let cars perceive, understand, and interpret their surroundings. ... The folks at Stanford will concentrate on computer vision and machine learning. ... It will also work on human behavior analysis, both for pedestrians outside the car and the people 'at the wheel.'" Toyota's efforts will be led by Gill Pratt, who ran DARPA's Robotics Challenge.

Comments

THIS I'm OK with.

[kheldan]

Technology is supposed to help people, not replace people. Technology in your car that helps you be a better driver is a good thing. I have been, and will remain of the opinion that attempting to replace human drivers, literally preventing them from actually operating the vehicle, is a bad thing. What Toyota is aiming for, if implemented well, will be a good thing.

Re:THIS I'm OK with.

[ShanghaiBill]

Technology is supposed to help people, not replace people.

When you make a phone call, do you still call the operator, and ask her to switch the wires on the punchboard?

Re:THIS I'm OK with.

[Dutch Gun]

Technology is supposed to help people, not replace people.

Since when? Our lives have vastly improved since technology has been replacing people, typically by doing things that are repetitive, boring, and/or dangerous (all of which describe driving).

Think carefully about how silly your assertion sounds in a broader context. How'd you like to go back to planting and harvesting fields by hand. Yeah, technology replace a bunch of people there. How about digging tunnels with picks and shovels? Oops, yeah, technology replaced all that sort of backbreaking labor. What about entire offices filled with people mindlessly adding columns of numbers? Technology eliminated that sort of work, didn't it?

Computer algorithms will probably be several orders of magnitude better at driving than humans, and all that time currently spent in traffic can now be used for productivity, relaxation, or socialization. Still, you probably don't have to worry for a while. The first generation of self-driving cars will start adding these features gradually, and we'll use them as safety features or a more advanced cruise control for a while. It's going to be quite a while before humans are *completely* out of the loop when driving.

Re:THIS I'm OK with.

[NetFusion]

They are behind and trying to catchup. Subaru already has the jump on them with Eyesight technology

I've used it, it works, and has saved me from a collision with a lead car making a false start in a merge, made a 1000 mile road trip a breeze with adaptive cruise that will even bring you to a stop in heavy traffic , and once alerted me about lane departure while nodding off behind the wheel when i was really tired. It has taken awhile to adjust that the car technology is shadowing my decisions and ready to act, but now I'm use it to and wouldn't buy a car without it. This is the thin end of the self driving car wedge.

Re:THIS I'm OK with.

[ShanghaiBill]

It turns out solving the self-driving problem does not do away with the air-drag problem.

To some degree, it does. SDCs can drive much closer together in "platoons", greatly reducing drag.

Automobile Platooning

Re:THIS I'm OK with.

[MrL0G1C]

It does help people.

It helps disabled people who can't drive.
It helps blind people.
It helps old people.
It helps young people.
It helps people who haven't passed their driving test.
It helps people who are too tired to drive.
It helps people who are too drunk to drive.
It helps people who shouldn't drive because they are on medication.
It helps people who simply don't want to drive and would rather talk on the phone or do work.
It even helps cyclists and pedestrians because the roads will be safer.

I sincerely look forwards to the day when drivers are legally confined to racetracks and private land.

Re:THIS I'm OK with.

[MrL0G1C]

That's nice but the simple fact is a lot of people simply aren't responsible enough to drive safely and policing the roads is not effective and doesn't remove them at least here in the UK, where you can kill someone and oops sorry, slap on the wrist.

You like driving, fine, do it on a racetrack or private land is my attitude for the future. Self driving cars will likely be 80-90% safer and even more for cyclists, pedestrians and horse riders etc.

Or the compromise could be the car senses when you've lost concentration and you lose control of the car for the rest of the journey.

Re:THIS I'm OK with.

[Sark666]

Why is it a bad thing? let's say for sake of argument that the tech works and it's significantly safer than human drivers. Is it still a bad thing? I read that there are on average 40,000 fatalities due to driving in the US each year. I can only imagine the world wide figure. And that doesn't include devastating accidents where someone is crippled for example and other serious injuries. No solution is perfect but lets say the figures drop to 10,000. Are you still against it? And are you only against it because of tech replacing people? Would you rather the figure stay at 40,000 simply for the sake of keeping humans doing this? (driving in this case)

You say tech is supposed to help people not replace them, I'm sorry but that's pretty much what all technology does. It does what was once previously done by a human. From bank tellers to automotive assembly to farming equipment and on and on. I once read an article talking about technology and it said it's going to eliminate capitalism. Capitalism at it's heart is to pay a human being for goods or services that person provides. Well, technology devalues that work and makes it cheaper.

So if you are against technology replacing people well you are pretty much against technology in general. What was once man work becomes machine work. It's been going on for ages since the invention of the plow, it's just that now we are going to see this accelerate at a very dramatic rate.

$50 m is a rounding error

[vpness]

Why is this news?

$50 million?...

[pinzvidz]

... that's a piss in the ocean for Toyota.

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