TOKYO — Toyota Motor Corp., sometimes branded as too slow and cautious in the self-driving vehicle race, is finally mapping out a faster track into automated driving technologies.
Through the acquisition of the U.S. high-tech mapping company Carmera Inc., the world’s largest automaker expects to get a boost in its pursuit of higher-level autonomous capabilities in the next several years.
The acquisition could mark a breakthrough for Toyota, whose automated driving technology is offered only in certain top-shelf grades of two nameplates, the flagship Lexus LS luxury sedan and the pricey Toyota Mirai fuel cell vehicle.
Under the deal announced last week, Toyota’s in-house automated- driving subsidiary Woven Planet will buy Carmera with an eye to creating vehicles protected in “safety envelopes.” Detailed, updateable digital maps are seen as a necessity for advanced automated driving, and the partners plan to develop a cost-effective system geared toward mass- market deployment.
Mandali Khalesi, Woven Planet’s vice president of automated driving strategy and mapping, said the buyout of Carmera will enable Woven Planet to jump-start development.
Woven Planet expected to begin creating high-definition digital maps of U.S. roadways in 2022. But with the Carmera deal, it can begin creating them by the end of this year. Once complete, the maps will be available to move beyond Level 2 automated driving in “much less” than five years, he said. The initial set of map data will encompass virtually every paved road in the country, he said.
After that, customers will be able to carve out and customize data sets.
“We’re looking at expanding our footprint to the U.S. so we can start building up our map operations there. That really gives us a head start in being able to bring forward the timeline,” Khalesi said in an interview last week.
Woven Planet declined to disclose how much it will spend for Carmera, a company that uses vehicular crowd-sourcing and remote sensing to capture street-level change for the maps. The companies want to use more affordable off-the-shelf technologies, such as dashcams, to automatically update digital maps through the cloud.
The deal is Woven Planet’s second major acquisition, following its $550 million purchase in April of Level 5, the self-driving car unit of ride-hailing giant Lyft. Woven Planet CEO James Kuffner has said such deals are part of its go-big strategy. The goal is to make Toyota as strong in software as it is in hardware. That idea is rooted in the belief that future value in the auto industry will come from selling software and services, not from manufacturing vehicles.
Carmera’s technology melds existing inexpensive camera technologies to automatically record and upload changes to the highways and byways as vehicles drive by.
The maps will be accurate to a precision of 12 to 20 inches, Khalesi said. That will be critical to tie together other technologies such as cameras, radars and a vehicle’s “inertial measurement unit” — the brain that encompasses such gadgetry as the gyroscope, accelerometer and GPS.
The key is to create an affordable redundancy that reinforces vehicle safety. “We blend them together for a kind of safety envelope that doesn’t give an overreliance on one sensor that could be a critical point of failure which could endanger the passenger,” Khalesi said.
Woven Planet envisions launching the new map technology first in the U.S. and Japan.
Toyota rechristened its autonomous driving and software subsidiary Woven Planet in January, but its operations date back to 2018 when it was founded as the Toyota Research Institute – Advanced Development.
Woven Planet and Carmera have been working on projects together since 2018. Those collaborations laid the groundwork for the acquisition. Carmera will now report through one of several new business arms in the Woven Planet organization, called the Automated Mapping Platform.
Woven wants the Automated Mapping Platform to become “the most globally comprehensive” road- and lane-mapping system, offering precise, localized maps to automated vehicles. Acquiring Carmera gives the Japanese company a head start in the important U.S. market.
“With Carmera joining the team,” Khalesi said, “we’ll be able to hit the accelerator.”