Toyota to Lead $2.8 Billion Investment into New Autonomous Car Company

Toyota is establishing a new company to develop autonomous driving technologies with its current partners and between them they will invest almost $2.8 billion into it. It will be named “Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development” (TRI-AD) and will accelerate the company’s efforts in advanced development for automated driving. To enable the new efforts at TRI-AD, Toyota Motor Corporation, Aisin Seiki, and Denso have reached a provisional agreement on the joint development of fully-integrated, production-quality software for automated driving. Aisin Seiki and Denso will each own 5% of the new company with Toyota owning the remaining 90%. The new company is targeting a staff of approximately 1,000 employees, including external recruitment and staff from TMC, TRI, and Toyota Group Companies Aisin and Denso. The news come two years after Toyota announced that they were going to invest $1 billion into Autonomous car R&D, the formation of TRI-AD is seen by the company to be the next logical step to reach autonomous driving.