Toyota Workers First on Streets with DSRC Tech

Greg Hyde

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24th August 2018

Toyota is rolling out its new dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) system to its workers to try in their own cars.

At an event in Ann Arbor, Michigan for locally based company employees and their families, Toyota said it wants its employees to take part in a final shake-down of the new system. The carmaker has previously announced plans to deploy DSRC on its commercially available vehicles from 2021 onward.

The event was designed to showcase the Ann Arbor Connected Vehicle Test Environment (AACVTE), a project run jointly by Toyota’s R&D arm and the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI). The AACVTE is purportedly “the world’s largest connected vehicle test environment for the DSRC 5.9GHz vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology” and is in the midst of being expanded from north-east Ann Arbor to cover the entire city.

UMTRI director James R Sayer said adoption of the technology by Toyota employees would allow the automaker “to gather data critical to advancing transportation safety. A fully operational deployment enables UMTRI to conduct $3M to $5M in research a year, making it a significant living laboratory”.