A self-driving Toyota barely moved, but still managed to collide with a visually impaired athlete during the Paralympics.
Happened in the Paralympic Village
Toyota Motor Corporation has stopped all its self-propelled e-Palette trucks operating during the Tokyo Paralympic Games. The decision comes in the wake of an accident in Paralympic Village yesterday when a Toyota e-Palette collided and injured a visually impaired athlete.
Toyota is a sponsor of both the Olympic and Paralympic Games. In 2015, they signed an eight-year contract worth around one billion dollars.
Level 4 self-driving
When the Olympics and Paralympics 2020 were announced in Toyota’s home country of Japan, Toyota used the event to showcase new technology including the self-driving concept LQ and announced that they would implement up to twenty of their self-driving e-Palettes during the Tokyo Olympics.
… Not ready for public road
Yesterday, however, Toyota took part in demonstrating that self-driving technology at level 4 is still not where it needs to be. An e-Palette hit a pedestrian who turned out to be a visually impaired athlete. The car was under the control of the driver using a joystick and had a speed of one to two kilometers per hour.
As a consequence of the accident, Toyota has decided to stop operating the self-driving e-Palettes.
Toyota apologizes
Toyota’s CEO apologized for the incident in a video posted on YouTube last Friday.
Judo practitioner with visual impairment
Toyota says the automated vehicles are designed to move slowly for safety reasons, but that did not help the Japanese Paralympic judo athlete with visual impairment, Arimitsu Kitazono, as he crossed the pedestrian crossing.
“A vehicle is stronger than a human being ”
At the time, the car was under manual control, which told police they “were aware there was a person there, but thought he would realize a vehicle was coming and stopped,” according to the Japanese news agency Asahi.
We are very sad and know that the accident has worried many people. A vehicle is stronger than a human. The accident shows that autonomous vehicles are still not realistic on normal roads.
Akio Toyoda, Toyota
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