On The Road To Self-Driving Cars, Toyota's First Stop Is Crash-Free Camrys

Toyota's latest autonomous test vehicle was developed by Toyota Research Institute, the carmaker's Silicon Valley advanced tech unit. Automated vehicles capable of taking over driving duties from humans like robotic chauffeurs are coming, though exactly when they get here remains fuzzy. In the runup to that, Toyota wants to leverage the same artificial intelligence and advanced sensors that self-driving cars rely on for a system it calls "Guardian" to achieve something equally remarkable: Cars that can't crash. "With a Guardian vehicle the palette of things the car can do would be way more than just using the steering wheel and stepping on the brake," Ryan Eustice, vice president of autonomous driving for Toyota Research Institute, told Forbes at a recent briefing in Sonoma, Calif. "Imagine going through an intersection and you're going to get T-boned. The right thing for the car to do is accelerate you out of that. That requires a huge amount of understanding on the car's part to be able to safely do that."