Toyota said the organisation won’t rush into the production of driverless vehicles, which is current gaining ground in the automobile industry.

The Chief Executive Officer, Toyota North America, Jim Lentz told journalists at the 2016 Automotive News World Congress on Wednesday that the organisation may release vehicles with self-driving abilities until 2020.

Lentz said: “Our belief is that a human driver must always be behind the wheel.”
Autonew said a Toyota or Lexus vehicle with highway self-driving abilities won’t arrive until 2020 at the earliest and a fully autonomous vehicle is even farther off — 2023 to 2025.
According to Toyota, 96 percent of fatal car accidents involve the driver, so if any automaker can build systems that intervene in any degree to prevent or mitigate the collision, it can have a dramatic impact on safety, even without completely autonomous driving.
“We don’t see a day coming soon where you can just hop in the back seat, pull out your newspaper and scan the headlines while your car takes you to work,” Lentz said.

However, Toyota wants to ease autonomous features into its vehicles over the next decade and use them to enhance a driver’s skills, reduce accidents and increase mobility for people who don’t currently have it — such as aging Baby Boomers or disabled people.

Toyota has pledged to invest $1 billion over the next five years in artificial intelligence and robotics r&d to support those objectives. It’s also spending $50 million to set up artificial intelligence research centers in Stanford and MIT.
“I’m not sure if 2020 is realistic,” he said. “But I think that’s why we’re all driving towards autonomy.”
He added: “If there’s a way that we can override some poor decisions that are made, we are going to save a lot of lives and we won’t have accidents to begin with.”