The quest for building a crash-proof car by Toyota Motor Corp is not merely a job for Gill Pratt. The thought of making such a car came from a painful childhood memory when he saw a boy on a bicycle being hit by a car. Pratt said, “The part that I remember the most were his shoes… His shoes on the road, those were what was left of him.”
Pratt is now on the project to build a dream team in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics. The cars that he is planning to develop would eliminate all driving errors and thus, will be able to curtail the 1.25 million road accident deaths that happen every year (according to World Health Organization).
Pratt was earlier working with the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, named Darpa. Here he was the top roboticist. Toyota seems to be in a battle with the auto-industry and there are new rivals like Google and Uber Technologies Inc. too. Even in the field of artificial intelligence, the car maker is going to face competitions from the likes of Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc.
According to Pratt, “If you’re producing real products — physical things that can intervene in the world and make life better and improve the quality of life for people — it means a whole lot… Making an app for a phone, which may help just a tiny bit, might involve the same effort, but the reward is not as much. We’ll actually be in very good shape when we try to attract and retain really good talent in Silicon Valley.”
The new initiative would be beneficial towards the company’s business. Introduction of autonomous driving would potentially expand the market.
So what do you think? Will autonomous driving improve road safety and road accidents?
