Category Archives: Toyota

Azure, Big Data, connected car, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Toyota

Toyota and Microsoft launch connected car initiative

ToyotaJapanese car brand Toyota has teamed up with Microsoft to launch Toyota Connected, a new joint venture to further the car manufacturer’s efforts towards autonomous vehicles.

Toyota Connected builds on a standing relationship with Microsoft to leverage Azure cloud technology to make the connected driving experience smarter. Based in Plano, Texas, Toyota Connected will expand the company’s capabilities in the fields of data management and data services development initiatives.

“Toyota Connected will help free our customers from the tyranny of technology. It will make lives easier and help us to return to our humanity,” said Zack Hicks, CEO of Toyota Connected.  “From telematics services that learn from your habits and preferences, to use-based insurance pricing models that respond to actual driving patterns, to connected vehicle networks that can share road condition and traffic information, our goal is to deliver services that make lives easier.”

The connected cars market has been growing healthily in recent years, but is not new to Microsoft or Toyota as the two companies have been collaborating in the area of telematics since 2011, working on services such as infotainment and real-time traffic updates. A 2015 report stated that connected car services will account for nearly $40 Billion in annual revenue by 2020, while big data and analytics technology investments will reach $5 billion across the industry in the same period.

The new company itself has been given two mandates; firstly to support product development for customers, dealers, distributors, and partners, through advanced data analytics solutions, and secondly to build on Toyota’s existing partnership with Microsoft to accelerate R&D efforts and deliver new connected car solutions. The company have stated that its vision is to “humanize the driving experience while pushing the technology into the background”.

The launch of Toyota Connected will able enable the organization to consolidate R&D programs into one business unit, which it claims will ensure that all initiatives remain customer centric. Initiatives will focus around a number of areas including in-car services and telematics, home/IoT connectivity, personalization and smart city integration.

As part of the launch, Toyota will also adopt Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, employing a hybrid solution globally, whilst also housing a number of Microsoft engineers in its offices in Plano.

“Toyota is taking a bold step creating a company dedicated to bringing cloud intelligence into the driving experience,” said Kurt Del Bene, EVP, Corporate Strategy and Planning at Microsoft. “We look forward to working with Toyota Connected to harness the power of data to make driving more personal, intuitive and safe.”

data centre, Datacentre, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, smart car, Toyota

Toyota to build massive data centre and recruit partners to support smart car fleet

Toyota smart car standCar maker Toyota is to build a massive new IT infrastructure and data centre to support all the intelligence to be broadcast its future range of smart cars. It is also looking for third party partners to develop supporting services for its new fleet of connected vehicles.

The smart car maker unveiled its plans for a connected vehicle framework at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

A new data centre will be constructed and dedicated to collecting information from new Data Communication Modules (DCM), which are to be installed on the frameworks of all new vehicles. The Toyota Big Data Center (TBDC) – to be stationed in Toyota’s Smart Center – will analyse everything sent by the DCMs and ‘deploy services’ in response. As part of the connected car regime, Toyota cars could automatically summon the emergency services in response to all accidents, with calls being triggered by the release of an airbag. The airbag-induced emergency notification system will come as a standard feature, according to Toyota.

The new data comms modules will appear as a feature in 2017 for Toyota models in the US market only, but it will roll out the service into other markets later, as part of a plan to build a global DCM architecture by 2019. A global rollout out is impossible until devices are standardised across the globe, it said.

Toyota said it is to invite third party developers to create services that will use the comms modules. It has already partnered with UIEvolution, which is building apps to provide vehicle data to Toyota-authorised third-party service providers.

Elsewhere at CES, Nvidia unveiled artificial-intelligence technology that will let cars sense the environment and decide their best course. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang promised that the DRIVE PX 2 will have ten times the performance of the first model. The new version will use an automotive supercomputing platform with 8 teraflops of processing power that can process 24 trillion deep learning operations a second.

Volvo said that next year it lease out 100 XC90 luxury sports utility vehicles that will use DRIVE PX 2 technology to drive autonomously around Volvo’s hometown of Gothenburg. “The rear-view mirror is history,” said Huang.