Toyota Says No To Fully Autonomous Car
May 8th, 2013 11:21 AM
Share
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.”
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.