zzdcar
Home
/
Reviews
/
Racing
/
Toyota Will Use Rally's Unpleasant Surprises To Make Autonomous Cars Safer
Toyota Will Use Rally's Unpleasant Surprises To Make Autonomous Cars Safer-August 2024
2024-02-19 EST 22:11:27

It’s easy to program an autonomous car for an ideal world, where no one makes a mistake and other cars do exactly what you expect of them, but that’s not how real life works. According to , Toyota found the perfect lab of unexpected calamities for its autonomous technology: the World Rally Championship.

Rally—the art of flinging a car down a goat path known as a “stage road” as fast as possible—is still a sport that belongs to a human driver, and a human codriver who helps the driver navigate each turn and hazard of the stage. Everything from to to to to can appear on stage to ruin a team’s day.

The cow seemed largely nonplussed.

Toyota wants to study how an autonomous driving program would handle these obstacles by putting sensors on the car.

Toyota Motorsport boss Koei Saga explained to Autocar that much of their goal is to train Toyota’s autonomous technology sensors to recognize problems faster:

Right now the biggest technical difficulty [for autonomous driving] is that on the road you cannot expect everything. So when somebody suddenly drives directly in front of you or if the road is quite crowded or if some people are crossing the road without checking whether a car is coming, most of the sensors that we have right now cannot react that fast. This is one major challenge we are dealing with.

We also put our sensors on to our rally cars and they can, for example, predict a rock that is in the road in front of the car. When the sensors become capable of dealing with those obstacles at the speed of a rally car, we can enhance the level of sensor technology as a whole.

Most humans can’t even react as quickly as a WRC driver, so using those cars blasting down tiny roads at ridiculous speeds should provide plenty of data.

Toyota has a partnership with Microsoft to collaborate on analyzing data pulled from the WRC car, per Autocar. Microsoft is also a partner in the Toyota Research Institute, which is the branch where Toyota is researching autonomous driving technology.

Can we also make autonomous cars drive as fast as the WRC drivers? I’ve got other stuff to do than sit in a car, man. Thanks in advance.

Comments
Welcome to zzdcar comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
Racing
Netflix To Release Docuseries On Bubba Wallace, The First Black Driver To Win A NASCAR Race In Decades
Netflix To Release Docuseries On Bubba Wallace, The First Black Driver To Win A NASCAR Race In Decades
Last year, NASCAR driver became the first Black driver to win a Cup Series race since Wendell Scott took a contested victory in 1963. Wallace hit headlines the season before thanks to his activism. Now, Netflix is celebrating his career with a new docuseries set to be released on...
Aug 29, 2026
Here Are The Hand Controls That Allow Robert Wickens To Drive His Race Car
Here Are The Hand Controls That Allow Robert Wickens To Drive His Race Car
When Robert Wickens was paralyzed in an IndyCar crash in 2018 many figured his racing career was over, but this weekend he’ll be climbing back into the cockpit. Joining fellow Canadian Mark Wilkins in a special Hyundai Elantra N TCR racer, Wickens will participate in Friday’s four-hour BMW M...
Aug 29, 2026
The FIA Is Still Pretending Hypercar Has Been A Total Success
The FIA Is Still Pretending Hypercar Has Been A Total Success
Global sports car racing is going to be amazing starting next year. That’s when a slew of manufacturers — , BMW, Acura and Cadillac — are going to have their next-generation LMDh prototypes ready for competition. They’ll join the likes of Toyota, Peugeot and Ferrari, who are developing Le...
Aug 29, 2026
Formula One Might Run A Night Race On The Las Vegas Strip: Report
Formula One Might Run A Night Race On The Las Vegas Strip: Report
Lars Baron Formula One’s last foray in Las Vegas, NV was a little bit of a disaster: It was hot, it was located in a parking lot, and it wasn’t anywhere near being the big hit organizers thought it would be. But the powers that be in F1 are...
Aug 29, 2026
F1 Froze Engine Development Because Honda Left Red Bull. Now Honda's Back.
F1 Froze Engine Development Because Honda Left Red Bull. Now Honda's Back.
When and Formula One after the conclusion of the 2021 season, all hell broke loose. Red Bull Racing managed to convince F1 to freeze powertrain development while it sought out a new technical partner. Except, now Honda is back in the Red Bull Racing fold. Yep. Red Bull motorsport...
Aug 29, 2026
The Mustang Is Finally Going Racing On The World's Biggest Stage
The Mustang Is Finally Going Racing On The World's Biggest Stage
When Ford , the announcement disappointed a great many fans, partly because it always sucks to see a popular manufacturer back away from racing, and partly because the Ford GT was especially cool. It was like an old-school prototype that just happened to be mixing it up in the...
Aug 29, 2026
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.zzdcar.com All Rights Reserved