Toyota is testing a new self-driving vehicle, Highway Teammate, on Tokyo's Shuto Expressway, as it plans to commercialise automated highway driving technologies by 2020, according to a company release. Highway Teammate, a modified Lexus GS, features equipment that enables automated driving on highways and uses on-board technology to evaluate traffic conditions, make decisions, and take action during highway driving. This includes merging with traffic or exiting highways, maintaining or changing lanes, and maintaining inter-vehicle distances. The driver would be able to use a single switch to turn the auto-pilot mode on and off. Toyota has been researching and developing automated driving technologies since the 1990s under the Mobility Teammate Concept.
Significance: Automakers including Toyota, Nissan, and Hyundai, along with technology companies such as Google, are accelerating their research into systems that can make driving partially or fully automatic. The development also follows the Japanese government's recent announcement that it plans to commercialise use of autonomous vehicles by 2020 ahead of the Tokyo Olympics. It also started working with the Intelligent Transport Systems, a driver support system, expected to help accelerate the development of autonomous driving. In August 2014, Nissan upped the ante by unveiling plans to bring fully autonomous vehicles to the market by 2020, prompting others to follow suit in successive months. Toyota is also ramping up its research into and development of automated driving technologies simultaneously and announced last month a USD50-million investment in the United States to further research computer science and human-machine interaction.
