IDG Contributor Network: Toyota is going to help us all drive much faster by 2020

I’ve followed the autonomous car market for the past decade, and there’s one troubling problem. If you have ever driven in a car that drives itself, you know the car can be tentative -- and really slow. I remember how someone told me once that, when they went for a drive in a Toyota Prius as part of the Google autonomous car experiment, the car drove like his grandmother.

Interestingly enough, Toyota just spilled the beans about a new intelligent car program they are working on in conjunction with Stanford and MIT that’s designed to help humans drive better. They are kicking in a whopping $50M to fund the efforts. Gill Pratt, a roboticist who worked at DARPA, will head the program. One of the goals is to make a car that cannot get in an accident, according to the news reports. It’s a departure from the autonomous car model where you take your hands off the wheel and let a computer drive; instead, it’s a technology to augment driving and to protect you.

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