Toyota Says No To Fully Autonomous Car
Toyota’s CEO Akio Toyoda threw another bucket of cold water on wild fantasies of autonomous cars. Instead of developing cars that drive themselves, Toyota is thinking more of cars that assist you in driving.
“The driver should be given the freedom to freely select the road to drive on, and where they want to park,” Toyoda told reporters in Tokyo today. “That’s what is making cars unique. Control should remain with the driver.”
Toyoda can envision technology that “provides additional support for better driving, or to avoid risk and danger on the roads, something that might even exceed current abilities of human drivers. Automated driving that fully respects the capabilities of human drivers – that’s what we could support.”
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
More by Bertel Schmitt
Comments
Join the conversation
I, for one, welcome our autonomous overlords! I trust a computer to drive a car better than most people. One need only spend an afternoon in Oklahoma City traffic to concur.
Most Toyotas in HNL are already driven autonomously, judging by the absence of brains behind their steering wheels. It must be "the computer" that's responsible for the last-second lane changes, the left lane banditry, the...
Apparently no one pays attention to sci-fi movies. Yeah, the robots will do a great job reducing fatalities at first, but eventually they'll grow a hive mind and they'll start killing humans because they'll consider us a threat to ourselves. When that day comes, only one man will have had the foresight to keep his trusty Supercharged 300c SRT8 - completely devoid of future autonomous technologies and getting 10.1 mpg in a world where most cars are electric and gasoline has been devalued...
Just beam me up Scotty, I'm ready to bang that green chick again and this planet sucks.