Behind The Wheel – Episode 5: Building towards zero accidents
Every fatality is an individual drama and has a big impact on society. Around the year 2000, we were looking at more than 50,000 fatalities in in Europe every year. And uh our advanced drive assist systems definitely have contributed to reducing that number. stands for advanced drive assist systems. It’s a group name of systems which are primarily driven by camera and uh radar sensors who constantly monitor the surrounding of the vehicle. Watch for traffic. So the main idea behind advanced privacy assist systems is that they should be a kind of co-pilot. So you shouldn’t really notice that they’re there unless a sudden safety critical situation occurs. So here we have systems like uh lane trace assist and dynamic radar cruise control who constantly support you. The dynamic uh radar cruise control is a primarily radar based uh system which monitors the vehicles in front of you and it will automatically uh help you keep a safe distance to the car in front. One of the systems that is being rolled out now to all vehicles is a driver monitor system. So, it’s a camera that constantly monitors the driver and makes sure uh he or she is paying attention. Maybe your kids are shouting on the back seat. Maybe you’re distracted by something on the side of the road. So, Europe is a quite challenging environment for uh active safety systems. Every country has slight variations on traffic signs, traffic lights, lane marking and so on. In Germany, you have autoban with zero speed limit. But even in France 130 kph is considerably higher than the 100 kph which um is the the standard speed limit in Japan. One of the uh additional challenges now of course the the big expansion of of mobility solutions. We’ve seen quite a lot of new ebike and e scooter pop up uh recently. Uh, of course for camera and radar based systems that keeps us on our toes because every time something new is developed, we have to confirm that uh the recognition uh development is there. So that keeps us uh busy. Ever since the systems have been cascaded as standard fitment to all grades, we’ve seen a drastic reduction in in the the number of accidents and this definitely uh contributes uh to the zero accident uh goal that we we try to achieve.
Zero traffic accidents is an ambitious goal! Discover how Toyota is working towards it.
From radar and cameras to driver monitoring and adapting to new mobility solutions, Toyota’s Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are helping reduce road fatalities across Europe and evolving to meet real-world challenges. Discover how Tom Rycken and his team develop the ADAS systems and work toward safer roads for everyone in the latest episode of our Behind The Wheel series.
