For many enthusiasts, autonomous driving represents the antithesis of everything we love about cars. However, Toyota says that autonomous driving technology isn’t necessarily out to turn your car into a living room on wheels. Instead, the carmaker sees it as a way to augment the driver — and so it has developed the world’s first autonomously drifting car.
Developed by the Toyota Research Institute, the modified Supra is modified with a GReddy wide-body kit and some very quick software. Engineers say the programming can “calculate a whole new trajectory every 20th of a second.” It was developed with the help of professional drift driver Ken Gushi.
According to Toyota, even regular drivers may face situations where the best course of action through a tricky situation, such as encountering a patch of black ice or the sudden appearance of an obstacle, might be to drift through or around it.
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“When faced with wet or slippery roads, professional drivers may choose to ‘drift’ the car through a turn, but most of us are not professional drivers,” said research scientist Jonathan Goh. “That’s why TRI is programming vehicles that can identify obstacles and autonomously drift around obstacles on a closed track.”
The Supra isn’t fully autonomous yet. It’s programmed with the layout of the track, the 2-mile ‘West’ track of Thunderhill Raceway. It also knows where the pylon “obstacles” are. However, it’s still able to perform a series of graceful drifts around the track at the car’s traction limit.
In due time, though, the research may yield a car that can make evasive maneuvers in emergency situations rather than just try to brake as hard as possible.
Or, to hear senior manager of TRI’s human-centric research Avinash Balachandran describe it, “We are expanding the region in which a car is controllable, with the goal of giving regular drivers the instinctual reflexes of a professional race car driver to be able to handle the most challenging emergencies and keep people safer on the road.”
