Toyota Motor Corp.’s top safety executive tied the Japanese auto giant’s rollout of standardized automatic brakes and other advanced features to a broader strategy of forging ahead on developing self-driving cars after years of lagging competitors.
The move by the world’s largest auto maker by volume would be among the industry’s broadest rollouts of so-called active safety functions, which now are often sold as an optional package that tacks on hundreds or thousands of dollars. Features like pedestrian detection and adaptive cruise control will be offered standard on everything from high-end Lexus cars to the Yaris small car, Toyota global safety technology chief Kiyotaka Ise said in an interview Wednesday.
Toyota unveiled plans in March to install advanced safety features on most vehicles by the end of 2017, partly to show speedy progress toward a 2022 deadline pledged by major auto makers for making automatic brakes standard.