Toyota has announced that its Toyota and Lexus-branded vehicles will include vehicle-to-infrastructure technologies by 2021. The tech will be available in the US market that year, and the company hopes to push communications standards for both vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V).
Toyota will begin launching vehicles equipped with Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) systems in 2021. The goal is to have all Toyota and Lexus-branded vehicles in production deploying DSRC by the mid-2020s. The connected systems will be both V2V and V2I capable, so that they can collaborate with the environment "more broadly and effectively [...] to help drivers realize a future with zero fatalities from crashes," says Jim Lentz, CEO of Toyota Motor North America. The technologies would also improve traffic flow and congestion.
The DSRC initiative follows on a previous goal in which Toyota planned to have automatic emergency braking in nearly every vehicle sold by 2017. About 92 percent of Toyota and Lexus vehicles sold in the United States have AEB as standard, the company says. The industry as a whole has a standardized AEB deployment goal of 2022.
Toyota's DSRC system utilizes a standard which has been tested in automotive industry- and government-funded testing both in the lab and on public roads. The information broadcast by vehicles is sent and received several times per second, indicating the vehicle's location, speed, and acceleration. The information is anonymized for privacy and can be used by other DRSC-enabled systems to help prevent collisions and optimize traffic flow.
The DRSC system used uses seven channels in the 5.9 GHz spectrum, which the US government has allocated specifically for Intelligent Transportation Systems. The transmissions do not require a cellular connection, are short-range, and are easily received and relayed through infrastructure and vehicle components. Industry standards for DRSC are ongoing, but rapidly developing.
In Japan, DSRC systems are ubiquitous with most Toyota-branded vehicles having the capability on board or available. About 100,000 DSRC-equipped vehicles from Toyota are on the road in Japan currently. In the US, DSRC has been under development by the automotive industry for about 15 years.
Source: Toyota