It just occurred to me that the Japanese have had a long standing cultural love of robotics. They are also very concerned with their aging population.
And if anyone recalls it was the Japanese who launched some of the initial major break-throughs in driving assistance / automation:
1996 - Acura launched the first in-car vehicle navigation system in the Legend.
2004 - Infiniti launched the first active cruise control in the QX56 SUV (I have that SUV - it's radar based and was breathtakingly cool at the time, despite how primitive it is and how clumsy and error-prone its implementation).
2013 - Infiniti launches the first hands-off lane-keeping system in the QX50 sedan. But it's also primitive, severely limited in its capability and according to owners ping-pongs back and forth in lanes. Few people know about it outside of geek circles, Infiniti hasn't continually improved it AFAIK, and it just sits there in isolation. It is not part of a continually improving grand master plan on the scale of Tesla's networked fleet of autopilot Model S's.
And that - is it for Japan - as far as I can remember.
Where is Honda? Toyota? Nissan?
You would think that highway autopilot would have launched on Japanese streets long before America.
Instead we have a couple of visionary lone genius types from Israel and South Africa (Musk, and the computer scientists at Mobileye) actually pushing the first functional self-driving cars on the road - leading the revolution.
All of which is fine - this is just curiosity on my part.
And if anyone recalls it was the Japanese who launched some of the initial major break-throughs in driving assistance / automation:
1996 - Acura launched the first in-car vehicle navigation system in the Legend.
2004 - Infiniti launched the first active cruise control in the QX56 SUV (I have that SUV - it's radar based and was breathtakingly cool at the time, despite how primitive it is and how clumsy and error-prone its implementation).
2013 - Infiniti launches the first hands-off lane-keeping system in the QX50 sedan. But it's also primitive, severely limited in its capability and according to owners ping-pongs back and forth in lanes. Few people know about it outside of geek circles, Infiniti hasn't continually improved it AFAIK, and it just sits there in isolation. It is not part of a continually improving grand master plan on the scale of Tesla's networked fleet of autopilot Model S's.
And that - is it for Japan - as far as I can remember.
Where is Honda? Toyota? Nissan?
You would think that highway autopilot would have launched on Japanese streets long before America.
Instead we have a couple of visionary lone genius types from Israel and South Africa (Musk, and the computer scientists at Mobileye) actually pushing the first functional self-driving cars on the road - leading the revolution.
All of which is fine - this is just curiosity on my part.
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