Toyota eyes the future of car ownership

Automated driving and ride-sharing economy are changing the rules

Toyota Motor Corp., Asia’s biggest carmaker, is preparing for a potential future where people don’t buy cars.

That’s behind the hefty investments that the company has made in ride-hailing providers, most prominently the $1 billion (U.S.) that it poured into Southeast Asian leader Grab. Toyota sees the partnership as an opportunity to get Grab to buy more of its cars and to push services like insurance and maintenance, Shigeki Tomoya- ma, the global head of Toyota’s connected car division, said in an interview this month in Nagoya, Japan.

The pact with Singaporebased Grab forms the Asia prong of Toyota’s strategy to tie up with the strongest ride-hailing companies in each region, and then integrate its hardware and software into their services. Toyota is seeking an edge over rivals as carmakers are positioning for an uncertain future in which automated driving and the sharing economy threaten to displace the traditional model of vehicle ownership.

“We recognize that the mobility-as-a-service players control vast numbers of drivers and users, and are gaining supremacy over their local transportation systems,” said Tomoyama, who now sits on Grab’s board. “It’s not realistic for us to try and set up a car-rental or ride-hailing service from scratch in a market like the U.S. or Asia.” Tomoyama wants Grab to rent almost exclusively Toyota vehicles to its drivers, from an estimate of about three in five of its cars currently, Tomoyama said. Toyota also plans to install data recorders in all 7,000 or so cars in Grab Rentals’ Singapore fleet by the end of March and then expand that initiative to the rest of the region. That will help Toyota offer services like insurance and maintenance to the drivers through its connected-vehicle system, he said.

With Uber Technologies Inc. — into which Toyota poured half a billion dollars last month — the automaker is designing a specialized minivan for their robotaxi project. In Japan, Tomoyama says Toyota can leverage its existing rental-car business as a basis for offering additional services. The company is already conducting car-sharing trials in its home market.