Toyota to use World Rally Championship to develop autonomous technology

AUTONOMOUS car technology, and the wild and unforgiving rally stages of the World Rally Championship.

They seem like very strange bedfellows, but not for Toyota, who is using its 2017 factory entry in the WRC to develop its self-driving tech.

Though melding autonomous cars with the ultra-fast, ultra-risky world of WRC might seem like mixing oil and water, the pairing makes sense when Toyota explains the connection.

UK publication Autocar spoke to Toyota’s motorsport boss Koei Saga, who explained the high speeds of WRC cars and their close proximity to trees and other objects make rally stages perfect for developing better autonomous technology.

“Right now the biggest technical difficulty [for autonomous driving] is that on the road you cannot expect everything,” Saga told Autocar.

“So when somebody suddenly drives directly in front of you or if the road is quite crowded or if some people are crossing the road without checking whether a car is coming, most of the sensors that we have right now cannot react that fast. This is one major challenge we are dealing with.”

“We also put our sensors on to our rally cars and they can, for example, predict a rock that is in the road in front of the car. When the sensors become capable of dealing with those obstacles at the speed of a rally car, we can enhance the level of sensor technology as a whole.”

So no, your autonomous car of the future won’t come with a “gravel stage” mode, but it should at least be able to detect a pedestrian stepping into your path of travel much quicker than currently.

The factory Toyota team currently has a partnership with Microsoft, which will help collate and analyse the countless gigabytes of data the Toyota Yaris WRC cars will generate on the world’s rally stages.

Microsoft also has a partnership with the Toyota Research Institute, which is leading the company’s autonomous driving programme.

The sensors in the WRC car won’t be used for any performance advantage – the technology would clearly be unable to keep up with the lightning-quick reflexes of a professional rally driver – instead being used to passively observe, and learn.