Toyota simulator aims to eliminate traffic deaths

By Chang-Ran Kim, Asia auto correspondent

SUSONO, Japan (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp unveiled on Monday what it called the world's most true-to-life driving simulator to help it develop new safety features and reach its ultimate goal of eliminating all traffic deaths.

In a demonstration of its latest safety technologies at its Higashifuji Technical Center near Mt. Fuji, south of Tokyo, the world's biggest automaker invited journalists to its new facility that creates a virtual environment to analyze driving characteristics under various conditions such as drunkenness and drowsiness.

The warehouse-sized structure features a dome-shaped pod perched atop a turntable on a track that slides in all four directions at angles of up to 25 degrees to mimic the sensation of accelerating, braking and turning in different directions.

The 4.5-metre-tall, 7.1-metre wide pod can contain any car model and is lined on the inside with a screen that shows a moving, wrap-around view of the surrounding environment, giving the driver and passengers the illusion of moving on the road.

Big carmakers such as Daimler AG and Honda Motor Co have similar simulators, but Toyota's is the first to move laterally and has the longest range of 35 meters front to back and 20 meters from right to left, engineers said.

"It still needs some fine tuning, but we aim to start putting it to use in earnest from next April," said Takashi Yonekawa, a senior staff engineer at the centre.

For the first time since the facility's completion in September, Toyota allowed reporters into the pod, also visible through a glass pane from an adjacent room. The moving graphics, a true-to-life representation of 64 km (40 miles) of road in a 6-square-kilometre section of the surrounding region, were real enough to make spectators feel queasy even when the pod was stationary.

The system will be used to analyze driver behavior under different conditions to gauge what type of safety functions would be useful to reduce accidents in future cars, engineers said.