TOYOTA PRIUS DRIVES ITSELF
Toyota Prius drives itself Phone-controlled Prius recalls James Bond’s BMW, and the hi-tech amalgam can drive autonomously
Toyota has developed a Prius that can be operated accidentally with a smartphone – just like the BMW 7 Series from James Bond cine Tomorrow Never Dies. And Auto Express got to play Pierce Brosnan on the roof of the exhibition anteroom at the contempo Tokyo Motor Show.
The Automatic Vehicle Operation Arrangement (AVOS) includes a camera for account white lines, four lasers for spotting obstructions and two GPS sensors that can accurately locate the car to aural one centimetre.
Instead of walking up to the Prius, we were handed a smartphone. “Are you abiding you wish to alarm the car?” it asked. We apprenticed yes, and the car obediently collection itself to us. Toyota is so confident
in its arrangement that it chose not to accept anyone sitting in the driver’s bench as a precaution.
We again got in the aback and apprenticed “drive”. This is area our Bond fantasy ended, as the Prius instantly took ascendancy and collection itself about a baby circuit, alienated anchored cars. The appearance advanced was apparent on a screen, with obstacles overlaid by red markers.
The car does what we do as drivers: appraise aggregate for abeyant danger. Except this Prius is programmed to never yield its ‘eyes’ off the road. “The ambition is to annihilate accidents,” the project’s baton Susumu Umemura told us.
He’s aswell agog about the aide parking abeyant of the tech. When we ordered the Prius aback to its adequately bound atom amid two cars, the allowances of this became clear. “Some humans are not so acceptable at parking. This may be a way to advice them,” he said.
Full freedom would aswell plan on motorways, Umemura added. It’s easier to apparatus than auto active in cities, but even that ability not be far off as Toyota is aswell allowance to devise a way for cartage lights to forward cachet updates to cars.
Yet the ambition isn’t to abolish animal ascribe entirely. “We don’t ahead a association area the disciplinarian does nothing,” Umemura said. He wouldn’t be fatigued on amount or timing, but it’s bright that Toyota is actual austere about this technology.
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