Why I’m skeptical about Toyota’s approach to self-driving cars

Enlarge (credit: Toyota Research Institute)

As most of the car industry have scrambled to develop fully driverless car technology over the last few years, Toyota has taken a pointedly contrarian tack.

“None of us in the automobile or IT industries [is] close” to solving the challenge of fully autonomous vehicles, said Gill Pratt, CEO of the Toyota Research Institute, in a speech at the Consumer Electronics Show on Monday.

As a result, Toyota has taken a two-track approach to its own self-driving vehicle research. On one track, dubbed “Chauffeur,” Toyota is working to develop fully autonomous vehicles similar to those being created by Alphabet’s Waymo, GM’s Cruise, and other companies.