Road testing of vehicles equipped with the Guardian system (Photo: American Center for Mobility) (All photos/charts in this report provided by Toyota)

  At the 11th Automotive World Conference held in January 2019, Keiji Yamamoto, Executive Vice President of Toyota Motor Corporation’s Connected Company, presented a seminar entitled “Envisioning Smart Mobility Society in the Connected Future.” In it, he elaborated on the revolutionary changes spurred by the three pillars of electrification, AI/autonomous, and connectivity, and how Toyota is using these technologies to create a new mobility society, along with a general overview of the company’s CASE strategy. To summarize the presentation, Toyota aims to supplement the desire to create better, more beloved cars with electrification/AI/connectivity to deliver freedom of mobility to all people and create a mobility society (a society that provides mobility-based, ecologically sound happiness to customers).

  At the CES 2019, “blended envelope control”, the new assistive vehicle control concept for the Guardian system (a high-precision driver-assistance system) was introduced. Toyota also elaborated on the idea that the Guardian system may be usable as a failsafe and/or redundant system for Level 4-5 autonomous driving. While Toyota’s MaaS-oriented e-Palette vehicle line can use the autonomous driving systems of other companies, current plans are for Guardian to be installed as standard in Toyota vehicles.

  Also unveiled at the CES 2019 was the new TRI-P4 autonomated driving test vehicle.

Related reports:

Toyota: Accelerating Transition to Becoming a Mobility Company (December 2018)
Toyota's Mobility Strategy: Introducing DCM as standard equipment (August 2018)
Toyota's Electrified Vehicle Strategy: Sales of 5.5 million units and 1 million ZEV vehicles by 2030 (April 2018)
Toyota Automated Driving: The Guardian and Chauffeur approaches (March 2018)