Toyota Stops Use Of Self-Driving Palette Cars After Mishap

Toyota Motor said on Friday it had suspended all self-driving e-Palette transportation pods at the Tokyo Paralympic Games village, a day after one of the vehicles collided with and injured a visually impaired pedestrian, Sanjana Shivdas and Tim Kelly reported for Reuters.

Photo Insert: The Toyota e-Palette

In a YouTube video, Toyota Chief Executive Akio Toyoda apologized for the incident and said he offered to meet the person but was unable to do so. “A vehicle is stronger than a person, so I was obviously worried about how they were,” he said, answering questions about the incident.

Toyoda said the accident showed the difficulty for the self-driving vehicle to operate in the special circumstances of the village during the Paralympics with people there who are visually impaired or have other disabilities.

“It shows that autonomous vehicles are not yet realistic for normal roads,” he said.

The vehicle had stopped at a T junction and was about to turn under the manual control of the operator, who was using the vehicle's joystick control when the vehicle hit the athlete going at around 1 or 2 kilometers an hour, Toyoda said.

He said Paralympic officials had told him that the athlete, who remained conscious, was taken to the athlete village medical center for treatment and was able to walk back to their residence.

WEEKLY FEATURE : PAL READY TO SOAR WITH PANDEMIC