Toyota plans to debut its futuristic flying car in its home city in 2020. The Japanese automaker is making a flying car with the ultimate goal of using it to light the torch at the opening ceremony of the 2020 Olympic games in Tokyo.
Toyota recently unveiled a working prototype of its flying car to journalists. Here are some of the amazing photos.
Toyota is introducing a new robotic leg brace called the Welwalk WW-1000 that can help patients with partial paralysis affecting one side of their body walk again. The robotic exoframe is worn on the affected leg, with a large motor component at the knee joint that provides just enough assistance to the patient, letting them recover their own walking ability therapeutically over time. Continue reading… “Toyota’s new robot leg brace can help those with partial paralysis walk again”
Cars will be able to talk to each other to avoid accidents, merge onto highways and drive us to a destination we set on the GPS sometime in the near future. This type of technology is actually already on the roads across the world and will be rolling out in Australia over the next few years.
Japanese car maker Toyota announced this month that it has planned to have self-driving cars commercially available by 2020 — the same year Nissan, General Motors and Google plan to have autonomous vehicles on the road.
Toyota is looking into the possibility of developing vehicles that are capable of hovering just above the road, technology designed to improve efficiency. At Bloomberg’s Next Big Thing Summit in San Francisco, Hiroyoshi Yoshiki, the managing officer with Toyota’s technical administration group, said in an interview that the company had been studying a similar idea of flying cars at one of its “most advanced” research and development areas, but cautioned that the concept was not like actually flying around in three-dimensional space. Instead, he said, the plan is to get the car “a little bit away” from the road to reduce friction, similar to a hovercraft.
In California, Tesla has knocked off Toyota as the biggest auto employer in the state. Tesla employs over 6,000 people to the Japanese company’s 5,300. That lead is only likely to grow, as the EV manufacturer prepares to add another 500 jobs by the end of the year, and as Toyota begins its relocation to its new North American headquarters in Texas. The news comes barely a week after the company announced a $50 million loss during the first quarter of 2014.
Combustion engines are likely to persist for quite some time, despite the recent advent of usable, talented electric vehicles. The combustion engine will often persist as a component in plug-in hybrid and range-extended electric vehicles.
Toyota has developed two hyper-fuel-efficient small-displacement gasoline Atkinson cycle engines: a three-cylinder 1.0-liter and four-cylinder 1.3-liter which will be introduced across the range from next year in 14 different variations. The smaller engine will deliver 78 mpg in the Toyota Aygo, an improvement of 30 percent.
The expansion means hundreds of thousands more cars must come onto the Uber system.
To overcome its growing pains, Uber has come up with a brilliant new strategy. Uber is launching a pilot program to finance new cars. The company is partnering with GM, Toyota, and financial institutions to offer 100,000 driversreduced monthly car payments, in an effort get more Uber drivers on the road.
At the Geneva Auto Show earlier this year, Toyota showed up with a three-wheeled escape pod of an electric vehicle called the i-Road. At the time Toyota declared the diminutive vehicle production-ready. Not many “production-ready” concept cars ever actually see the light of day, but as it turns out, in the case of the i-Road Toyota has already begun producing the slick little vehicles. (Photos)