Toyota’s Self-Driving Cars Will Be Able to Drift
Toyota plans to add drifting capabilities to its autonomous car technology. There is a surprising safety reason to this function.
Written by Allison Stone
Reviewed by Kathleen Flear
The average commuter might ask, what exactly is the appeal of a self-driving car? In an ideal world, drivers could simply plug in their destination and let the car do the work, but the engineers at
Toyota
have something bigger in mind. Toyota is taking automation to the next level with a new series of cars that have one very special capability: drifting.
The current test subject of this breakthrough technology is a 2022
Toyota GR Supra
that has been equipped with some of the same modifications found in Formula One racing vehicles. According to Toyota, the automated drifting program allows for the car to “autonomously drift around obstacles on a closed track,” and “calculate a whole new trajectory every 20th of a second.”
Drifting is more than just a cool stunt
The end goal of this type of programming is about more than pulling some cool stunts—it's to see just how intelligent automated safety features can be.
In a critical situation, something like automated obstacle evasion could be the difference between a minor fender bender and a serious accident.
Toyota isn’t interested in making the average consumer into a professional stunt driver, but in putting the skills of a professional driver in the hands of the average driver via specialized technology.
"Through this project, we are expanding the region in which a car is controllable, with the goal of giving regular drivers the instinctual reflexes of a professional race car driver, to be able to handle the most challenging emergencies and keep people safer on the road," said Avinash Balachandran in a video released by the Toyota Research Institute.
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Autonomous technology has come a long way
To really understand automated driving, we have to look at how it is defined by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Officially, “self-driving” is when any amount of steering, braking, and acceleration are controlled without direct input from the driver.
The U.S. Department of Transportation
rates a vehicle’s ability to self drive on a scale from zero to five, with Level 5 meaning that the car is fully autonomous. Level 5 cars—which would in theory be able to operate in any conditions without a human driver present—do not yet exist, but are still being tested in closed-circuit environments much like the automated drifting Toyota Supra.
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