Toyota's Talking Car Wants to Be Your Clingy BFF

In one Toyota video, shown at the Tokyo Motor Show, a woman sits on a seaside cliff, talking about her father with her car. "He sounds like a great father," says Yui, in a baritone male voice. "You're a bit like him," the woman says. Until now, Toyota, the world's second-largest car maker by vehicle sales, has kept relatively quiet about autonomous vehicles and how it plans to deal with challenges from Silicon Valley upstarts, such as Google parent Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo LLC and others. "We think this is a good way to do it," said Didier Leroy, who oversees Toyota's business planning and operations.