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cover story 8 F O C U S you can say for sure is that the first autonomous Toyota vehicle will be extremely safe. We feel that the safety of the passengers and other road users is more important than anything else. However, to ensure this, there is still a lot of technology needed, both inside the vehicle and outside of the vehicle in connection with the infrastructure. Today, we have test vehicles, which can drive autonomously on clearly marked roads that provide the necessary infrastructure. Nevertheless, there must always be a Toyota employee in the driving seat with his hand on the steering wheel. I’m certain there’ll be a self-driving car. But for that to be accomplished, we are more in need of the connected car. Apart from that, careful consideration must be taken of the vehicle passengers’ personal data, so as not to intrude into areas that customers would prefer to keep private. This is a matter in which we have to be > The Toyota Mirai (Japanese for “future”) is the first hydrogen-fuel cell vehicle in the world to be produced in high volumes. and fuel cell vehicles – is their quality (i.e. in hybrid cars durability), which is equivalent or even better than that of conventional internal combustion engine vehicles. In this respect, and drawing on the experience we have with our hybrids, we see that the maintenance and service costs for a hybrid drive are much lower than for a conventional drive system. This is easily explained with the example of the brakes. Due to the fact that regenerative brakes are based on an energy recovery mechanism, the brake disks and brake lining show lower wear than conventional brakes. This logic can be transferred to many areas of a vehicle. ‹F.›: Keyword costs: Hybrid transmissions, for example dedicated hybrid transmissions, are not profitable unless they’re produced in higher quantities. Would this be an option for Toyota in order to lower production costs and ultimately make the vehicle more affordable for end-customers? ‹G.K.›: The Toyota hybrid is the best example for this. We removed the conventional transmission from the car and replaced it by a hybrid transmission, which contains two electric motors in our concept. With its unit numbers and costs, which we can pass on to our customers as prices, this is a concept which has proved very successful. ‹F.›: What are the odds of a Toyota vehicle becoming the first self-driving car on the market? ‹G.K.›: It’s not possible to say for certain which automaker will launch the first autonomous car. But what


Focus_2016_02_E
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