Whether you like it or not, the Toyota team has a knack for being the one to bring the technology we want to enjoy on the road to the market in the way that we accept and admire the most. Think about the hybrid car that Honda built with the Insight that ended up being a dud while Toyota brought the Prius to the market the following year and has enjoy an immense level of success with this car for several years. Now, we see self-driving abilities as a way that Toyota’s Autonomous Technology is advancing every year.
To be fair, the Toyota brand isn’t the only one working on self-driving technology, every automaker in the world appears to be trying to develop some form of this technology to offer us vehicles that are closer to being able to drive them. Even so, Toyota has put the work of creating this technology on their Research Institute team so that a new variety of technology can be created to allow cars from this brand to drive them or at least offer us more technology for our ride that will be safer on the roads in the next several years.
What Toyota has Created
The Toyota Research Institute is ready to bring the new self-driving technology to a show to give us a look at it. This team has created a research vehicle based on a Lexus LS 600hL which will use the latest in the self-driving hardware and software created from this team. This new system has been dubbed Platform 3.0 and it uses several systems for the operation.
The systems used include a Luminar LIDAR system with a 200-meter range and a 360-degree perimeter. There are also shorter range LIDAR sensors to aid this system and make it work with the desired results. The CALTY design studio team was tapped to create a clean look and non-obtrusive sensor system to make it possible for the research model to look more like a typical vehicle and less like some of the other test models that appear to be something out of a science fiction movie.
This vehicle shows that Toyota is working toward the goal of an autonomous car that is expected to lead the way in automated research while giving us a vehicle that neatly blends the equipment into the vehicle to allow the style and the beauty of a vehicle to shine through. The goal is to build a vehicle that can be easily reproduced to be part of the fleet of vehicles offered by Toyota to the market. There will be a handful of Platform 3.0-equipped models of the Lexus LS that will be used for testing purposes but we don’t know when they will make their way to public streets.
