Toyota Investing Billions In New Self-Driving Car Company

Toyota is one of the many companies exploring self-driving car technologies for the future of mobility. The Japanese car giant has announced that it’s teaming up with two of its suppliers to set up a new company that will be dedicated to the research and development of autonomous cars. Toyota and its partners are going to invest almost $3 billion into this company which will work toward developing “product-quality software” for driverless cars.

The Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development (TRI-AD) will receive this 300 billion yen or about $2.8 billion investment to develop production quality software for self-driving cars. Toyota’s investment is going to give it a 90 percent stake in the new company.

“This company’s mission is to accelerate software development in a more effective and disruptive way,” said James Kuffner who is the CEO of TRI-AD. It’s going to start operations with 300 employees and will eventually have 1,000 employees in its ranks.

Once it creates the fully-integrated, production-quality software for autonomous cars, the goal will then be to link that software with self-driving cars that have been created in-house. The aim with this new initiative will certainly be to enable Toyota to achieve full autonomy faster but it remains to be seen how long it will take this new $2.8 billion company to achieve its objective.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Transportation
Tags: Self-Driving Cars, toyota