By TAKURO CHIBA/ Staff Writer
February 5, 2020 at 16:30 JST
The Asahi Shimbun
Toyota Motor Corp. has developed a way to prevent accidents caused by accidental acceleration when drivers hit the gas pedal instead of the brake.
The issue has been grabbing headlines after a spate of accidents involving elderly drivers.
All new Toyota cars will come with the function starting this summer, the company said Feb. 3.
About 80 percent of Toyota’s new cars are already equipped with a system that stops a vehicle from starting when the exterior sensor detects obstacles like buildings.
But Toyota's new acceleration suppression function kicks in when a driver misapplies the acceleration pedal even if no obstacles are present.
To develop the function, Toyota analyzed what is known as big data collected from connected cars to identify abnormal acceleration. It identified common accident characteristics that occurred due to drivers depressing the wrong pedal.
The function can detect “pedal misapplication,” for example, in vehicles going 30 kph or slower when the driver abruptly steps hard on the accelerator and responds by suppressing the vehicle's acceleration.
Owners of 32 existing models of Toyota and Lexus vehicles can have their cars retrofitted to include the new function.
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