Toyota Research Institute (TRI) researchers modified a Supra sports vehicle to do sick slides around a racetrack – without a human at the wheel.
While seeing the sleek vehicle spin its wheels and dart around obstacles is immensely entertaining, Toyota maintains it’s all in the service of automotive safety.
And, regrettably, this isn’t about inventing a new chaotic motorsport — and, in the end, they argue, it’s not even about autonomous driving.
The researchers behind the experiment hope to get insights into how professional race-car drivers behave in specific scenarios, such as encountering a patch of black ice on the road, and then utilize their findings to design future automobile safety systems.
Toyota is attempting to broaden the range of controlability of a car with this initiative, with the objective of providing normal drivers with the intuitive responses of a professional racing car driver in order to tackle the most difficult circumstances and keep people safer on the road.
To avoid crashing, the car is digesting massive amounts of data and recalculating its path twenty times each second. It can also apply brakes to each of its four wheels separately.
It’s an astounding engineering effort that might one day save lives.
Reference- Toyota Research Institute (TRI) website & PR, Futurism, Inside EVs, EV Obsession