Pratt makes Toyota’s crash-proof cars quest his goal
THE QUEST to build crash-proof cars at Toyota Motor is not just a job for Gill Pratt. It is somewhat personal. Pratt still vividly remembers encountering the aftermath of a collision between a boy on a bicycle and a car that traversed a four-lane road as he walked home from elementary school in Springfield, New Jersey.
“The part that I remember the most were his shoes,” Pratt said in Novemberafter Toyota announced he would lead its $1 billion (R16bn) research institute.
“His shoes on the road, those were what was left of him.”
Industry battle
Handpicked by president Akio Toyoda to serve as chief executive of the Toyota Research Institute, Pratt is building a dream team in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence to design vehicles capable of overcoming driver errors and curtailing the 1.25 million roadtraffic deaths that occur every year, according to the World Health Organisation.
Pratt joined Toyota from the US military’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa, where he was the top roboticist. He has hired two former colleagues and managers from the agency, a former Google robotics director and professors from two universities on his resume – Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Olin College of Engineering – to the Toyota institute’s technical team.
Toyota has reason to bet big on Pratt and his institute. It is locked in a battle both with industry peers and newer rivals such as Google and Uber Technologies to develop autonomous driving technology.
Apple and Facebook also are among companies competing for the brightest minds in the field of artificial intelligence.
Views among Toyota’s top brass have evolved when it comes to automated driving. In the past, executives insisted on wanting to keep a driver fully engaged.
The car maker is now in the same camp as companies like Google in developing its technology all the way to building cars capable of going fully driverless.
In November, Pratt downplayed the challenges Toyota may face with recruiting. While he is seeking to bring Toyota along on software, no company assembles as much finished hardware in the automotive industry.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
Toyota’s technical team includes former Darpa managers Eric Krotkov and Larry Jackel, the former Google engineer James Kuffner, MIT’s John Leonard and Russ Tedrake, and Olin College’s Brian Storey.
Fatherly goal
The institute’s work could lead to benefits for Toyota’s business of selling cars. Autonomous driving holds the potential to expand the market of potential motorists, both among younger consumers and the growing global ranks of seniors in ageing societies, who face the prospect of having to give up their licences.
Pratt’s friend Chris Urmson, the director of Google’s self-driving car programme, has said he would like Google’s vehicle to be ready in time for when his son is old enough to get his driver’s licence about four years from now.
Pratt has a fatherly goal of his own: one of his four sons is 18 and has avoided getting his licence due to fear of getting in a collision.
Toyota envisions autonomous vehicles working much like the driver’s-education cars Pratt grew up with, which had an extra steering wheel and brake pedal for the teacher in the passenger’s seat side.
Equipping cars with artificial intelligence and deep learning capabilities would allow the vehicle to step in to avoid accidents like an instructor would. – Bloomberg