Toyota has just invested nearly $2.8 billion in a new Toyota based company that researches self-driving cars. These self-driving vehicles will be able to navigate the world without needing a driver behind the wheel.
According to Wall Street Journal’s report, the Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development (TRI-AS) will start building software specifically aimed at advancing and creating new self-driving cards. Although the company will start out with only 300 employees, the Japanese company has plans to expand to many more employees once they take off.
Although they don’t really have anything ready quite yet, they do have a lot of plans underway which they have been rather public about. With their announcement of their 2020 goal, they teased models that they are working on.
One of the biggest highlights of their new, autonomous vehicles is that they want to incorporate AI functions. For one thing, they want to be able to offer the ability to allow for conversations between the cars and passengers.
There are a lot of exciting things for us to look forward to with Toyota’s new goals. Driverless cars may be commonplace on the road faster than we can expect it.