Featured New Autonomous Vehicle Book (regarding section on Toyota)

Fully autonomous cars are farther off than people think. At the same time, Toyota does have many of the systems upon which autonomous cars will be built:

Cameras. The Prius has multiple cameras. The front one has enough computing power attached to do an optical-flow kind of processing to sense lane markers and curbs and to input steering correction. The camera also evidently has enough computing power attached -- perhaps coupled to other sensors -- to detect pedestrians and take action.

Radar. The Prius has front and rear radar. The front one has enough computing power -- and is evidently steerable, too -- so that it can adjust speed in relation to the car ahead, including around mild curves. It can also warn me of closing too rapidly and can initiate action (braking, crash preparation). The rear radars sense cars in my blind spots, or cross-traffic when I'm backing out.

Sonar. The Prius has about 8-10 sonar sensors. Like the radar, the sensors can initiate action when a problem is imminent.

Navigation. The Prius has a GPS- and inertia-enabled navigation system that can receive data via cellular and HD radio.

Each of these sensor/computing systems is supportive of the human driver, but they don't -- even in combination -- take any meaningful control from the driver. So even though DRCC can control the car's speed throughout the range from 0 to the driver's set limit, the driver still has to be engaged in the driving process because the car doesn't steer or navigate by itself. (It has LDA which assists and nags the driver in a limited way, but you can never imagine for a second that you're not the one doing the driving.)

So Toyota seems to be coming at it from a safety, augment-the-human viewpoint and when actual autonomous driving hits, I think they'll be able to move fairly quickly -- either licensing, copying, or buying autonomous capabilities. My guess is that Toyota's doing things behind the scenes, but doesn't feel the need to spell out their 5-year plan to develop autonomous vehicles at this point. It's not clear that Tesla an Google will benefit as much from their early-mover advantage as some may think. (For different reasons.) But it's not like Toyota's trying to breed faster horses in the age of motor cars.

 

what will they do when all the sensors are covered in 'weather'?

 

No guessing necessary. Toyota is just repeating their own success model.

Prius delivered 100 km/h (62.1 mph) propulsion using only electricity way back in late 2003, an obvious upgrade over the previous generation. Unfortunately, battery-tech was far too primitive still for them to take advantage of the design. So, they kept refining it in the meantime. Several upgrades later, we got Prime. The cost & capacity started to become realistic enough to begin to capitalize upon that opportunity.

So what if the current design "only" delivers 25 miles of range. The system is loaded with EV optimizations already. Who else in the industry has delivered such an efficient heat-pump? That 25 kWh/100mi efficiency rating is quite impressive too.

 

No reason why a hydrogen car can't by autonomous. It can know better than a human where the nearest hydrogen station is.

The millimeter radar Toyota uses has issues when it is raining.

Toyota did present those autonomous boxes on wheels at some auto show, so they are working on this, They are a conservative company though, and may not be giving it their full support.