James Kuffner once reprogrammed a Prius to turn it into a driverless vehicle for Google. Now, he's a top executive at Toyota Motor Corp., charged with hacking the way it approaches the business of carmaking. Handpicked by President Akio Toyoda, the 50-year-old tech-industry veteran's mandate as chief digital officer is to keep the world's No. 1 automaker on top as cars become more like computers. The shift to electrified, autonomous vehicles is the most disruptive force sweeping the industry, with Apple Inc. and other Big Tech challengers muscling in. At stake for Toyota is a global manufacturing empire churning out more than 10 million vehicles a year.

With its ambitious project to build Woven City -- a fully-connected, human-centered city at the base of Mount Fuji -- Toyota Motor Corp. aims to become a world leader in smart city technology. The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a rethink of how people move and live, and has reinforced the need to create technology that supports "happy, healthy" human life, says Toyota Chief Digital Officer James Kuffner. "Woven City is not meant to be a technology bubble where the technology stays only within Woven City. It's really meant to be a place where we incubate it, test it, accelerate it and then export it all over the world," Kuffner said in a recent interview. For countries like Japan, addressing the challenges posed by the graying of society -- such as mobility and healthy living -- is an urgent task.

Carmera and Toyota collaborated on a mapping project in Detroit in 2019. Less than three months after acquiring Lyft's autonomous vehicle unit for $550 million, Toyota subsidiary Woven Planet Holdings made another acquisition to strengthen its position in the market. Woven Planet is acquiring HD mapping startup Carmera for an undisclosed amount. Carmera and Toyota are already quite familiar with each other. The companies collaborated on multiple projects from 2018-2020 in Detroit, Michigan, and Japan.

Toyota Motor Corp.'s software and technology arm plans to embark on an ambitious hiring and acquisition spree as automakers globally jostle for pole position in the race to develop smart cars that will one day drive themselves. James Kuffner, CEO of Woven Planet Holdings Inc. -- the unit charged with leading the world's largest carmaker through an era in which the lines between technology and automobiles are increasingly blurred -- said he's looking to "double or quadruple the size of the company in the next couple of years." "And so that means organic and inorganic hiring, and when it makes sense, strategic acquisitions," Kuffner said on Wednesday. "We need a lot more people to deliver our mission faster and so I'm always looking for ways to attract, partner with and acquire top talent in that area." Acquisitions are already being made rapidly.

Toyota Motor Corp. is tapping a star Silicon Valley robotics expert to help put the final touches on an operating system it says will go up against that of Tesla Inc. Called Arene, the system allows new features to be installed in a car's existing hardware over the air and provides a platform for developers to create software. It's being developed by Toyota's new technology research arm Woven Planet Holdings Inc., led by Chief Executive Officer James Kuffner, a former Google engineer. Tesla is already a leader when it comes to over-the-air updates of a car's operating systems, which control everything from braking to Wi-Fi, locking and lights. It has been upgrading its electric vehicles' battery range and autonomous functions remotely via updates since 2012. On an earnings call last week, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said Tesla is willing to license its software capabilities to third parties and is already in talks with original equipment manufacturers.

Toyota Motor Corp. plans to first deploy advanced self-driving features in commercial vehicles before adding them to cars meant for personal use, a senior official at the Japanese auto major said on Tuesday. It will be easier to apply self-driving technology that does not require constant and direct human-monitoring to taxis and vehicles Toyota is developing, including on-demand ride services, mobile shops and ambulatory hospitals, said James Kuffner, chief of Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development (TRI-AD). The operators of these vehicles could control when and where they are deployed and oversee their maintenance, he told reporters at the opening of its new offices in Tokyo. "It will take more time to achieve'Level 4' for a personally-owned vehicle," Kuffner said, referring to the automation level at which vehicles can drive themselves under limited conditions. "Level 4 is really what we're striving for to first appear in mobility as a service," he added.

Inventor and artist Aaron Taylor Kuffner's artistic robotic orchestra, Gamelatron fuses technology, sound, sculpture, and engineering to create a visceral experience based on acoustic resonance and robotic technology. Based on ancient Indonesian bronze gongs called the gamelan, Kuffner brings the past to the present to create a kinetic sculpture. He works with master craftsmen from Indonesia to fabricate the gongs and then alters their shape and then adds a finish to create unique pieces of sculpture. He crafts each robotic part and electronic components by hand to create a'digital brain,' (made of pulse width modulation chips, circuit boards, etc.) installs mechanical mallets and builds custom mounts for each sound sculpture. The circuit boards Kuffner uses today are made in partnership with Lumigeek.

NEDO, Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, is a regular funder of robotic technology, has an office in Silicon Valley, and participates in various regional events to promote its work and future programs. One such event was Robots on the Rise: The Future of Robotics in Japan and the US held October 16th in Mountain View, CA and jointly sponsored by Silicon Valley Forum. Over 400 people attended the all-day series of panels with well-known speakers and relevant subject matter. Panels covered mobility, agricultural robotics, search and rescue, and the retail and manufacturing revolutions. Henrick Christensen from UC San Diego gave an overview of robotics in Japan and the US as a keynote.

Renting out a 100,000-square-foot San Francisco cruise ship terminal feels ostentatious, even for a Silicon Valley coming out party. But Luminar, a small company dedicated to a far corner of the nascent autonomous vehicle industry, and its 22-year-old founder, Austin Russell, happily shelled out the $20,000 day-rate to rent Pier 35. Not for a fun or lavish celebration--in fact, there are only about six of us gathered in the cavernous building--but because it's one of the few places in the city big enough to demonstrate the power of the lidar system Russell has spent the last five years creating. A system that Toyota, a major carmaker with rapidly expanding self-driving car ambitions, says it plans to adopt for use in its vehicles. Standing at one end of the empty building, Russell hands me a pair of binoculars and points my gaze to a 30-by-30-ish square of black posterboard, resting on an easel 200 meters away.

AI might be a hot topic but you'll still need to justify those projects. The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) just announced its technology leadership team at CES. In November Toyota announced an initial five-year, $1 billion investment in TRI, which will be a research and development enterprise designed to bridge the gap between fundamental research in robotics and artificial intelligence and product development. In other words, the mandate is to develop all the cool AI stuff happening in labs and DARPA-backed research projects and bring it to market. Comparisons have been drawn to famous industrial laboratories like Bell Labs and PARC, which are jointly responsible for an impressive chunk of silicon-age advances. Some of TRI's specific mandates are to enhance the safety of automobiles, with the ultimate goal of creating a car that is incapable of causing a crash; to increase access to cars to those who otherwise cannot drive, including the handicapped and the elderly; to help translate outdoor mobility technology into products for indoor mobility; and to accelerate scientific discovery by applying techniques from artificial intelligence and machine learning.