Skip to main content

Toyota to turn Mobility Teammate concept into reality by 2020

Toyota has pledged to make its Mobility Teammate concept a reality by 2020. The Japanese manufacturer announced during the ITS World Congress in Bordeaux yesterday that it has been testing a new automated driving vehicle – called Highway Teammate - in Japan and planned to bring products based on it to market in the next five years. The new vehicle, a Lexus GS which has been modified for autonomous driving, has been tested on a section of highway in Tokyo, changing lanes and entering and exiting at junctions
October 6, 2015 Read time: 2 mins

1686 Toyota has pledged to make its Mobility Teammate concept a reality by 2020. The Japanese manufacturer announced during the ITS World Congress in Bordeaux yesterday that it has been testing a new automated driving vehicle – called Highway Teammate - in Japan and planned to bring products based on it to market in the next five years.

The new vehicle, a Lexus GS which has been modified for autonomous driving, has been tested on a section of highway in Tokyo, changing lanes and entering and exiting at junctions without help from the driver.

Mobility Teammate is based on the idea that interactions between drivers and cars should “share the same purpose, like close friends who sometimes watch over each other and sometimes help each other out”. Toyota has been active in this area since the 1990s, but the announcement this week suggests that the company will now be pumping resources into research and development, with Toyota saying it wants to achieve a society where “mobility means safety, efficiency and freedom”.

A spokeswoman added that Mobility Teammate could be important for older people especially – a theme that was touched on at the opening of the Congress this week by Violeta Bulc, EC commissioner for mobility and transport. Like Japan, Europe has an ageing population which would benefit from autonomous driving and connected vehicles, she said, since it would give older people who might not otherwise be able to use cars an opportunity for an extended social life.

Bulc also warned that the ingenuity of companies such as Toyota will not be sufficient by itself to ensure widespread uptake of driverless cars. “The intelligence of vehicles will not be enough – we need intelligent infrastructure,” she said.

Related Content

  • July 31, 2015
    Three-quarters of UK drivers ‘don’t want a driverless car’
    This week the government announced plans to put US$31 million into the research of driverless cars. Thanks to this funding, autonomous cars are set to be trialled in the UK by the end of the year. With this in mind, independent vehicle supply group OSV carried out a survey to find out if they wanted driverless cars. Surveys were previously carried out when the conception of autonomous cars was first released. OSV wanted to know if opinions about driverless cars have changed now the research has develope
  • April 29, 2015
    Foundation funds research for informed campaigning
    ITS International talks to Professor Stephen Glaister, director of the transport research and lobbying organisation, the RAC Foundation. It is through the eyes of an economist that Professor Stephen Glaister, emeritus professor of transport and infrastructure at Imperial College London and director of the RAC Foundation, views current and future transport problems. Having spent 30 years at the London School of Economics and another 10 at Imperial, the move to the RAC Foundation was a radical departure from
  • October 17, 2019
    Getting C/AVs from pipedream to reality
    The UK government has suggested that driverless cars could be on the roads by 2021. But designers and engineers are grappling with a number of difficult issues, muses Chris Hayhurst of MathWorks Earlier this year, the UK government made the bold statement that by 2021, driverless cars will be on the UK’s roads. But is this an achievable reality? Driverless technology already has its use cases on our roads, with levels of autonomy ranked on a scale. At one end of the spectrum, level 1 is defined by th
  • July 23, 2019
    How C/AVs could serve rural communities
    In Ireland, there is low population density and a lot of rain – which can make last-mile journeys a trial. Orla O’Halloran at Arup has some thoughts on how C/AVs could serve rural communities Connected and autonomous vehicles (C/AVs) have the potential to be a vital link for people in rural communities, as part of a wider Mobility as a Service (MaaS) solution. That is the view of Orla O’Halloran, intelligent mobility consultant at Arup. She believes that MaaS needs to be considered in conjunction with ot