Driving Simulator

Developing safety technology from a driver's perspective.

Driving Simulator set in the Toyota Motor Corporation Higashi-Fuji Technical Center boasts one of the world's largest experimental facilities in creating situations close to that of actual driving scenarios. Here, experiments mainly based on the analyses of people's driving behaviors are conducted to develop various active safety technologies. In the safety-related researches of the past, there have been significant achievements in helping to protect vehicle occupants from external risks such as a car crash, largely due to outstanding developments in passive safety technology and driving support functions for risk aversions. Conversely, it has been difficult to experiment and analyze the internal risks (risk factors the drivers themselves carry), resulting in little research findings thus far. It is stated that 93%(Figure 1) of accidents are ascribed to errors in driver's recognition and judgment. In an effort to steer the drivers themselves away from causing an accident, Toyota is now beginning to probe the next stage of the active safety technology development by examining the human (driver) physiology.

Figure 1

Super realistic visuals, audio, and vibration

Inside a large dome is a spherical screen where high-resolution visual images stretch out 360 degrees. Once the machine gets started, the driver feels the vibration of the road, hears the road noise and even the wind noise, as if actually driving a car. The driver can also feel the actual level of acceleration when accelerating or decelerating, or driving along a curve. The sense of reality created by the cutting-edge technology is so authentic, that one needs to be reminded that it is, in fact, a simulated drive. All these painstaking efforts are made to collect data from the examinees as close as possible to that of actual driving condition.

Efforts in reducing accidents in everyday life

The scenery displayed to the driver inside the car is the kind many people see while driving to work or on holidays. There is no drama in such a scenery, and despite being able to create a visual image of any town or weather in the world, we choose to feature an ordinary scene as most car accidents occur in normal, everyday life settings. To further develop active safety technologies, it is indispensable to analyze operational characteristics of those drivers who make errors in an everyday setting, and to aggregate the results of these experiments.

What is impossible in reality becomes possible in experiment

With the Driving Simulator, we can safely conduct experiments that would otherwise be impossible even in a controlled environment of a test course, allowing us to examine behaviors such as dozing-off-at-the-wheel, looking-off-the-road, or driving-under-the-influence. We inspect what a driver sees under various situations with an eye gaze measuring device, at the same time examining the driving maneuver on the steering wheel, accelerator, and brake with varying instruments. In addition, it is also possible to gather data such as brain waves and heartbeat which are effective for analysis of driver’s psychological and physiological states. In order to steer the driver further away from the driving-related risks, we at Toyota are making efforts in the research and development of driving support technology and to apply the findings to our products.

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Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.