Right around the time Toyota asked everyone to stop calling it boring, the company gave a startup called Cartivator more than $350,000 for its “flying car” that’s supposed to be commercialized by 2020. But the flying car is actually more like a drone, and it, um, doesn’t work very well so far.
Donald Trump is angry on Twitter at an automaker again, calling out Toyota earlier today for building a new plant in “Baja, Mexico” to manufacture the Corolla sedan. He probably meant the new plant actually being built in Guanajuato, Mexico.
At CES on Wednesday, Toyota revealed Concept-i, an AI-assisted concept vehicle that uses machine learning to “build a relationship that is meaningful and human.” Among other things, this apparently means the ability to wink demurely at its driver.
You may already use some sort of fitness tracker app or wearable which you swore, at the time, would be the thing to get you back in shape. You probably lost all motivation shortly after. Well, the Toyota of the future is here to remind you, so that’s a problem now.
I’ll admit that when I first heard of the 2017 Toyota Prius Prime, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Part of me thought that it may be that performance variant of the Prius I’ve been imagining. Another part thought it was just a Prius that can only be divided by one and itself. Both parts were wrong: the Prius…
The new Toyota Supra. Not since the C7 Chevrolet Corvette has there been a sports car enthusiasts have been more excited to see uncovered. And like the C7 Corvette, we think we can show you before anyone else what it’ll look like.
Japan’s birth rate has been on decline for some time now, so engineers at Toyota have come up with an ingenious solution to help people apparently feel the companionship of kids: an annoying robot.
Sure, we give Toyota a lot of crap for building wildly successful, reliable and boring appliance-cars, but somewhere deep in their organization is a loon with a dream of building insane flying cars. I’m pretty sure this is the case, because this is not the first flying-car patent to come from Toyota’s secretive Kook…
A recently released commercial about a retired gentleman in some future year getting a drive in the production model of an autonomous vehicle concept prominently shows the man as part of an interracial, perhaps international, family, thus recognising and normalising the increase in mixed families in Japan.
In March, the Toyota Research Institute bought up Cambridge-based startup Jaybridge Robotics, and according to Tech Insider, they may be expanding with another famous Massachusetts company: Google’s Boston Dynamics, the maker of the Big Dog and Atlas robots.
Jalopnik East has covered all the developments of the Char Anzable Gundam Toyota Auris promotional concept, to a small production run, and finally to its second and current iteration. It has been profitable for Toyota, so perhaps unsurprising that Toyota is heavily promoting it in animated commercials and going all…
Self-driving cars, as popularized by the likes of Google and Tesla, are meant to be transportation bubbles that operate free of any human interference. But full autonomy isn’t the only option, and Toyota is investing in a system that would use computers as an aid to human drivers, not a replacement.
The boundaries between technology and automotive sectors continue to blur, and now Toyota and Microsoft have announced that they’ll be working together to imbue cars with artificial intelligence that will, they promise, humanize the driving experience.
“It is entirely possible that robots will become for today’s Toyota what the car industry was when Toyota made looms,” said Dr. Gill Pratt, the company’s Executive Technical Advisor and CEO of Toyota Research Institute, at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show.
When the first Star Wars movie came out in 1977, Toyota had a Celica painted and sticker’d up with Darth Vader and friends (technically enemies, actually.) The car was given away, the creators got mired in legal trouble, and now that we’re riding a fresh wave of Star Wars PR somebody wants this thing back.
Cars are either going to poison us with secret emissions or just drive themselves, so it’s no surprise that car manufacturers are looking to branch out. In Toyota’s case, that takes the form of a $1 billion investment in a Silicon Valley AI research center.
How can we make smart robots as popular and widely used as smartphones? Ploppin’ ‘em in your pocket is a good place to start—or your cupholder, in this case. At the Tokyo Motor Show this week, a miniature version of the first talking robot in space was revealed. It can hitch a ride in your car with you, keeping you…
Icon 4x4 builds Frankenstein vehicles—off-road trucks that meld modern mechanicals with vintage bodywork to create jaw-dropping machines. As founder Jonathan Ward showed off two of his creations to us, it became clear: These aren’t just hot-rods; they’re architecture, fashion, and industrial design rolled into…
Patent number US20150246720 was published yesterday, from Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America. It’s a design for a wing system for a potential flying car. And not just any wing system — it’s a stacking one that looks like an 1898 flying machine contraption. Go home, Toyota, you’re drunk.
For most of Cape York, the remote peninsula north of Cairns that runs parallel to the Great Barrier Reef, the nearest major city isn’t even in Australia, it’s in Papua New Guinea. You know, where head-hunting was a thing up until a couple of decades ago. We just drove through it on the most challenging off-road trail…
