Toyota's Driverless(ISH) Future

- John Lippert, Bryan Gruley, Kae Inoue, and Gabrielle Coppola

John Leonard strolls up to a drab one-story garage on the campus of MIT and unlocks the door. The building is remarkable only for the reflective windows, which make it impossible to peek inside. “If you were driving past in a taxi,” Leonard says, “would you think the future of Toyota is being designed here?”

Inside squats a silver Lexus LS 600hL sedan. It’s not just any Lexus—this one is vital to Toyota’s effort to develop driverless vehicles. Leonard, vice president for automated driving research at the almost three-year-old Toyota Research Institute, explains how the Lexus is jury-rigged with radars, video cameras, and lasers that can detect, identify, and react to objects up to 200 meters (656 feet) away—twice as far as a year ago. His charges steer the Toyota-built car around Cambridge, Mass., to capture data that can be used to create digital maps and try to extrapolate how a vehicle might behave without a human at the wheel. “It’s sort of like a science project,” Leonard says. “Stay on the road, don’t hit things, don’t get hit.”

If only it were that simple. Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s most valuable automaker, with a market capitalization of $200 billion, is behind in the race to create the vehicles of a maybe-not-so-distant future. Just four years ago, Akio Toyoda, the company’s president, was saying his company would pursue self-driving vehicles only after one beat a human driver— for instance, him—in a marathon road race. He’s not saying that anymore, because Toyota has too much to lose.