Toyota, SoftBank team up for self-driving car services
TOKYO (Reuters) – Toyota Motor Corp. and SoftBank Group Corp. said they will team up to develop car services that rely on self-driving technology, such as hospital shuttles, as they envision a future in which fewer people drive their own vehicles.
The partnership between Japan’s top automaker and its most influential tech giant shows that even big wellfunded players fear being left behind in the race to develop autonomous and connected cars.
The partnership between Japan’s top automaker and its most influential tech giant shows that even big well-funded players fear being left behind in the race to develop autonomous and connected cars.
On the same day, Daimler AG and Renault said they may expand their cooperation to batteries, self-driving vehicles and mobility services.
Toyota and SoftBank’s new venture will start with ¥2 billion ($17.5 million) in capital, with SoftBank owning just over half of the business.
It will be called MONET, short for mobility network, and potential car services could include meal deliveries, shuttle buses as well as vehicles that offer onboard medical examinations, they said.
While both firms have been independently developing technologies for self-driving vehicles and car sharing, and each have investments in ride-hailing firms Uber Technologies, Grab and Didi Chuxing, this is the first time they have come together.
“We are trying to take traditional car making into new fields,” Toyota president Akio Toyoda told reporters. “We realized that SoftBank shares the same vision when it comes to the future of cars, so it’s time that we partner together.”
Toyota, which has been mainly developing automated driving and artificial intelligence technologies in-house, expects the future will include convoys of shuttle bus-sized, self-driving multi-purpose vehicles used, for instance, as pay-per-use mobile restaurants and hotels.
It has been developing a service called “e-Palette” based on this concept. Amazon.com Inc., Didi, Uber and Pizza Hut are early partners in the project, and Toyota has said it plans to use the service to ship athletes and guests around during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.