Toyota is forming a $2.8-billion company for self-driving research
Toyota's autonomous vehicle dreams are too big to contain, so it's establishing a new company to speed up its technology's development. The automaker has teamed up with fellow Japanese entities Aisin Seiki Co., Ltd. and Denso Corporation to form the Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development or TRI-AD. While they're still figuring out how things will work in their joint venture, they have a clear goal in mind: to develop a "fully-integrated, production-quality software for automated driving." The partners will invest 300 billion yen or around $2.8 billion to achieve that goal and are already in the process of looking for the perfect location for their headquarters in Tokyo. Once that's done, they plan to staff up the HQ with 1,000 employees, both newly hired and taken from their own personnel. Dr. James Kuffner, the new company's CEO, said in a statement: "Building production-quality software is a critical success factor for Toyota...