Japan Advances on Self-Driving Road

TOKYO—Toyota Motor Corp. on Thursday started selling a safety device that allows a car to communicate with other vehicles or traffic lights, part of an effort to change the perception that Japan trails Silicon Valley in driving technology.

Separately, Tokyo-based Robot Taxi Inc. said it would work with authorities to start an experimental driverless taxi service next year, following in the footsteps of Google Inc., which has been testing its self-driving cars on U.S. roads.

As Silicon Valley players such as Google champion self-driving vehicles, many Japanese automotive executives have expressed caution, saying more time is needed to make fully autonomous cars feasible, and consumers may not want them.

That has led to a perception that Japan may have fallen behind Silicon Valley—though Toyota, which has been studying autonomous driving for two decades, says its technology is a match for Google's.

Toyota's new device, which costs around $250 and is available only in Japan, allows cars to exchange data with other cars or infrastructure like traffic lights via radio waves.

For the moment, the device's usefulness is limited because it can talk only to other versions of itself, and few traffic lights or cars are equipped. But the company said it hopes eventually to introduce the device in mass-market cars world-wide.

It could alert a driver about the location of other vehicles—useful when visibility is poor—or tell how much longer it will be before a red light turns green.

Toyota, like other auto makers, already includes in many new models a crash-prevention system that consists of radar and a camera. The new system is the next step by allowing cars to get information from each other, rather than relying solely on radar and camera images, said Toyota safety executive Moritaka Yoshida.

"We believe that initially, safety technologies that can operate independently will spread aggressively," Mr. Yoshida said. "That's going to be followed by the ITS technologies"—intelligent transport systems.

Different countries use different radio frequencies for transportation purposes. But it is relatively easy for the device to adapt, Mr. Yoshida said, observing that mobile phones can easily be used in multiple countries.

Meanwhile, Robot Taxi Inc., a joint venture between mobile-Internet company DeNA Co. and vehicle-technology developer ZMP Inc., said it would offer driverless transport to about 50 people in an area near Tokyo, part of an experiment backed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government. Robot Taxi aims to commercialize the service by 2020.

For now, the car, which will drive itself a distance of about three kilometers (2 miles) between homes and grocery stores, will carry crew members as an extra layer of safety.

Jun Hongo contributed to this article.

Write to Yoko Kubota at [e-mail]

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October 01, 2015 08:45 ET (12:45 GMT)

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