Toyota Goes Timidly into the Future

LAS VEGAS — “We believe the driver should always be in control of the vehicle,” Jim Pisz, Toyota’s corporate manager of North American business strategy, told Wired, and that is all you need to know about the automaker’s plans for autonomous vehicles. Toyota is being cautious. Calculated. And in typical fashion, reserved.
Toyota and its luxurious sibling Lexus showed off their “advanced active safety research vehicle” Monday morning at CES, and it packs some cool tech. The LS600h sports high-def cameras, advanced GPS, radar and light detection and ranging (LIDAR) laser tracking systems similar to those on Google’s autonomous Toyota Prius hybrids and Lexus RX SUVs. But this isn’t a collaboration between the two industry titans. Toyota and its Ann Arbor, Michigan-based team are going it alone for a reason.
Instead of creating a fully autonomous vehicle, Toyota is taking a similar – if less ambitious — route than its German rivals. While Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi have committed to offering some kind of low-speed autonomous driving system on their next generation of vehicles, Toyota is taking a more conservative, layered approach...

Toyota Inches Oh So Cautiously Toward Autonomous Tech