Toyota (TM, Financial) recently announced its plan of building a massive, 60-acre facility in Michigan to facilitate the testing of autonomous vehicles in “edge case” driving situations. Testing such extreme situations on autonomous vehicles is undesirable on public roads because of the dangerous consequences in the event of a technical failure. The automaker ceased its self-driving experiments on public roads in the U.S. following a lethal crash witnessed by a self-driving Uber in Arizona.
This is one of the key reasons why proving grounds are increasingly becoming popular among automakers and technology companies to run a variety of controlled tests on their vehicles without having to worry about untoward circumstances. Uber has its proving ground in its reserved location in Pittsburgh, while Waymo performs all its extreme tests on its vehicles in Castle in Central California.
What about Toyota
Earlier, Toyota had been sharing its vehicle testing location with Honda (HMC, Financial) and Lyft at the GoMentum Station in California. That site has been identified as one of the 10 autonomous vehicle proving grounds by the U.S. Department of Transportation in 2017 so that automakers or tech giants can test their technology and procedures in a structured environment without causing uncontrolled mishaps.
The designated site encompasses around 20 miles of paved roads with barracks and buildings offering a realistic urban environment. However, Toyota was very clear to build its privately controlled and secured site to test its autonomous vehicles so that its experiments do not come in the eyes of its competitors.
Since the start of 2018, Toyota Research Institute has been performing on-road testing of its autonomous vehicles in California and Michigan. In addition, the Japanese carmaker was in talks with Uber regarding acquiring the latter’s self-driving software before the occurrence of the fatal crash in Arizona.
In details
Testing driverless cars in realistic conditions has its own problems with huge exposure to uncertain and deadly consequences. However, it is vital for automakers to test their cars against extreme situations so that appropriate measures and technology can be incorporated before these cars hit the road. This is precisely why Toyota is building a secured test facility at Michigan Technical Resource Park. Here, the company will put its autonomous vehicles against "edge case" scenarios to assess the technology's limits.
Toyota is working to expose its vehicles to congested urban landscapes, slippery surfaces, and four-lane highways having high-speed entrance and exit slopes. The facility is scheduled to begin operating by October. In this context, Toyota filed a construction permit this week to convert the 60-acre land into a dedicated closed-course facility for testing extreme scenarios too risky for experimenting in public roads. Though Toyota put a stop to public testing of autonomous cars, it continued experimenting on closed facilities. A company spokesperson said:
“Our pause in testing on public roads in California and Michigan has allowed us to further refine and upgrade our Platform 2.0/2.1 test-vehicle fleet, in-line with the ongoing build-out of the Platform 3.0 fleet, introduced at this year’s CES in Las Vegas…We will resume testing on public roads in a few weeks, once these three systems have been more closely aligned. It’s important to note that our closed-course testing did not stop during this time.”
Toyota will not be disclosing the results of the testing for some time. However, once released, it will be critical to understanding the limits of the technology and taking counteractive measures. The aim is to prepare for an autonomous system that can handle life-threatening situations.
Disclosure: I do not hold any position in the stocks mentioned in this article.
