Jim Lentz talks about Toyota's self-driving cars

They're concerned the drivers are upset, and the program will resume when they're ready to get back behind the wheel.

Lentz said that even the test cars in its “Chauffeur” self-driving mode -- meaning the vehicle is fully in control -- “typically have two drivers and two steering wheels.”

And there are just a small number that are tested on public roads. He wouldn’t say exactly how many such cars are there are.

Lentz said that although Toyota doesn’t know about the specifics about the Arizona crash, the questions it raises are interesting.

“My thinking on policy is, we believe first and foremost that autonomous cars are there to save lives -- not to put Uber drives out of business,” Lentz said. “Autonomy could technically save 35,000 lives a year, but it won’t be perfect and people will lose their lives.”

The way Lentz figures it, tens of thousands of people die in car crashes in the U.S. each year.

If most of those are in some way the result of human error, then autonomous cars could eliminate the vast majority of crashes. But the number is never going to get down to zero, Lentz said.

“Even if you save a net, as a government policy are you willing to accept other similar accidents?” he said. “If the answer is, ‘No,’ I think that’s going to slow down the adoption of these [higher level] autonomous vehicles.”

Still, Lentz said cars are evolving to be closer to autonomous, even if they don’t fully drive themselves.

“Today we have emergency braking and a host of sensors, which are a precursor to autonomy,” he said. “That next step, in our case, is this guardian mode, where you will be in control of your car but they will prohibit you from making a big mistake -- stop you from turning down a one-way street.”

Then, he said, you get to the level of autonomy of Toyota’s “Chauffeur” mode.

In early March, Toyota announced it was spending almost $3 billion to start a new company based in Tokyo aimed specifically at taking the research and development that the world’s dominant carmaker has been doing at its Toyota Research Institute facilities and creating software that will get those ideas into vehicles.

Full story here: https://t.co/4EL1rBa557?amp=1

For more about the Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development partnership with Denso and Aisin Seiki, see

Toyota commits $2.8 billion to launch self-driving software company in Japan  | Toyota | Dallas News

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