Toyota Motor and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) plan to invest a total of 500 billion yen (US$3.27 billion) by 2030 into an infrastructure and software platform using artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce traffic accidents.
The carmaker and telecommunications giant said in a joint statement on Thursday that they want to develop a mobility AI platform that uses large amounts of data to support driver-assist technology, aiming to have a system ready by 2028.
The joint push comes at a time when Japanese carmakers are facing pressure to step up their efforts in the growing autonomous driving market, which is increasingly dominated by Tesla and various Chinese companies.
Toyota and NTT said they hope the platform will help with things such as preventing accidents caused by poor visibility in urban areas, supporting autonomous-driving services and making it easier to merge on expressways.
Their goal is to make the system available not just for themselves, but for other industry players, the government and academic partners who want to reduce traffic accidents to zero, targeting widespread adoption from 2030 onwards.
