Toyota wants to make e-scooters safer on the road

MANILA: Toyota is in the middle of a multi-year study of e-scooters to better understand its relationship to vehicles on the road with the goal of making its use safer for everyone.

With e-scooter related road accidents on the rise, and the chance for it to go higher imminent as people rely on them for transportation during the pandemic, one of the world’s biggest automakers is teaming up with leading universities, hospitals, research institutions and federal agencies to develop safety systems in Toyotas to mitigate crashes with e-scooters.

“I became interested in e-scooter safety after visiting my daughter at the University of Michigan. Walking around campus, I saw many students riding e-scooters without much concern for the other vehicles around them and not following any rules regarding direction or speed. Around the same time, data from many hospital ERs were also reporting an uptick of e-scooter related incidents,” said Rini Sherony, Senior Principal Engineer at the Toyota Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC).

Toyota is currently collecting and analyzing data from fully instrumented e-scooters and vehicles, including info from LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) capable devices, to look for the types of interactions between these two modes of transportation that may potentially cause an accident.

The goal is to come up with tools that will allow vehicles to detect and recognize e-scooters and then activate advanced safety features to prevent a collision.

In the process, Toyota also hopes to identify safety issues with e-scooters and recommend updates to make it safer ride for commuters.

Photo from Toyota North America

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