• Japanese automaker Toyota and Alphabet’s Waymo have announced a new partnership.
• Together the pair aim to eliminate vehicle crashes by making autonomous vehicles more widely accessible.
• The pair plan to accomplish this by creating a new autonomous vehicle platform.

Approximately 1.2 million people die in road traffic crashes every year with young people often the main victims in these incidents according to the World Health Organisation. In a bid to address this problem, Japanese automaker Toyota and Alphabet’s Waymo have announced they will be working together to address the growing problem of deadly crashes.

This will be accomplished through a new autonomous vehicle platform that the pair of firms will be developing together. The pair will investigate how to leverage Waymo’s autonomous technology alongside Toyota’s vehicle expertise with a view to enhancing the next generation of personally owned vehicles.

As far as collaborations go, this is a rather massive one. Toyota is regarded as one of the most reliable car brands in the world and Waymo is considered one of, if not the best autonomous car platform. Waymo currently operates an autonomous ride hailing service through Waymo One in several US cities.

“Waymo’s mission is to be the world’s most trusted driver. This requires global partners like Toyota that share our commitment to improving road safety and expanding accessible transportation. We look forward to exploring this strategic partnership, incorporating their vehicles into our ride-hailing fleet and bringing the magic of Waymo’s autonomous driving technology to Toyota customers,” explains co-chief executive officer at Waymo, Tekedra Mawakana.

Of course, much like every other car manufacturer on the planet, Toyota has been working on its own automated driving solution but it likely realised that going at it alone was going to be a costly and complicated affair. That having been said, Toyota does have its own advanced safety technology in the form of Toyota Safety Sense which is comprised of multiple advanced safety technologies. The company believes it can improve on this with Waymo and accelerate both the development and adoption of driver assistance and automated driving technologies for personal vehicles.

“Toyota is committed to realizing a society with zero traffic accidents and becoming a mobility company that delivers mobility for all. We share a strong sense of purpose and a common vision with Waymo in advancing safety through automated driving technology, and we are confident this collaboration can help bring our solutions to more people around the world, moving us one step closer to a zero-accident society. Our companies are taking an important step toward a future with greater safety and peace of mind for all,” says member of the board and executive vice president of Toyota, Hiroki Nakajima.

Whether this means we’ll see Waymo powered vehicles beyond the US is unclear. However, given how long these autonomous vehicles have been in development, and the fact that their use has been limited to the US we suspect that it will be a while before we see the tech outside of the US.

While Tesla touts its Full Self Driving features as among the best, that solution relies solely on vision which isn’t great. Waymo makes use of technologies such as LiDAR which offer up more detail than plain out vision can and as a result, is able to offer a full self driving taxi service.

It also has the benefit of not crashing into walls as frequently.