Toyota spends $50 million to accelerate self-driving car program "Toyota is spending $50 million to accelerate the pace of its autonomous car research, the Japanese automaker announced Friday. The company will use the investment over the next five years to establish joint research facilities at both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, both of which team with professors boasting robotics, engineering and artificial intelligence degrees."
Forget now where I saw it, but another version of this story spun this as Toyota being more interested in technology to help the driver, rather than in autonomous vehicles.
And six years ago, the automatic braking, lane following, and adaptive cruise control was a $2k option AFTER buying an extra $6k of eye candy, model upgrage. <GERRRR> Bob Wilson
While the car companies are developing autonomous driving technologies, the hacking community is demonstrating how ridiculously easy it is to spoof the systems: Researcher Hacks Self-driving Car Sensors - IEEE Spectrum
It will be a whole different world when all cars drive them selves and people don't even know how to drive. As long as a driver can take over at will, there will be nuts that crash cars.
they're not serious. Google has spent 10-20 times that amount in their efforts. A true self-driving car will put many car makers out of business - probably only 1/10th the number of cars produced now will be needed with the proper sharing scheme. Few but the rich will be happy out laying some huge CapEx $$ for something that would sit idle most of the time.
And then there's the Apple ICar. But, you'll need to buy the ICar 4, 4s, 5, 5s, etc, every 12 - 18 months like an IPhone/IPad.
