About a year after announcing plans to partner on the development of self-driving vehicles, Toyota and Aurora Innovation have put their prototypes on the road.
These are based on a model you're familiar with, the Sienna minivan. The tests are taking place on various roads in Texas, notably in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Aurora has been testing self-driving semis there since 2020.
During the tests conducted with the adapted Siennas, the vehicles must be able to make U-turns and lane changes, and be able to merge into traffic by taking a freeway ramp. The prototypes must also react properly to irregular situations, such as avoiding vehicles on the shoulder of the road, maneuvering through a construction zone and dealing with bad weather.
The autonomous driving system developed by Aurora is known as Aurora Driver, and it is the system that Toyota has integrated in the Sienna models now being tested. For now, there is a human on board each vehicle tested to react if the system fails.
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Aurora's device capabilities are Level 4, which means that a model can drive itself for long periods of time and through specific conditions, the most common being an area predetermined by geolocation. Moving to Level 5, the ultimate goal, the vehicle independently does everything a human operator could.
Aurora's goal is to develop a reliable autonomous driving system that can be integrated with taxi and truck fleets. The company wants to offer a comprehensive service package to businesses by covering financing, insurance and maintenance issues, as well as provide the autonomous driving technology itself.
For its part, Toyota is still far from offering a self-driving vehicle. The new 2022 Mirai and 2022 Lexus LS 2022 (which share a chassis) are the first vehicles from the automaker to offer some autonomous features, but we're talking about Level 2, in which the driver must be alert and available at all times.
Clearly, Toyota will be benefiting from the knowledge gained from its partnership and current testing with Aurora, which it can apply in some or all of its future models. At some point.