Toyota perspective on the ADAS market towards automated driving

The automotive industry is currently undergoing a phase of breakthrough innovation, adopting new technologies in its operations at an unprecedented scale. The entire sector is about to be transformed: new alternative drivetrains, autonomous driving, enhancement of connectivity and the onset of new concepts of mobility. Such substantial transformation of the automotive world is commonly described by the acronym of "CASE" mobility: Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric. Technological advances in these 4 areas are considerably changing the automobile concept, reinventing driving and the overall customer experience. Major manufacturers are responsible to lead the way, designing and delivering these innovations to the majority of the customers in the market. In this regard, I was given the opportunity to undertake an internship at Toyota Motor Europe (Brussels, Belgium) in the Product & Marketing Management division. PMM handles product planning (volume, specification, pricing), marketing strategies and lifecycle management. Within the division, I joined the department Cross-Carlines, responsible for creating a consistent strategy across the Toyota lineup. In particular, my responsibilities revolved around safety specifications and ADAS. The objective of this research work is to structure an overview of the various ADAS features currently made available to customers and to present the latest ones which are gradually emerging, by means of research aimed at identifying the key manufacturers and their offerings, with a focus on the European market. The study is constructed on the basis of researches tackled during the internship, logically structuring the information to provide an exhaustive analysis of current and upcoming ADAS features from a product and marketing viewpoint. The dissertation begins with a presentation of Toyota and its main company figures. The focus then moves to vehicle safety, highlighting the importance of ADAS and classifying the corresponding features according to the SAE levels of autonomous driving. Afterwards, global NCAP safety authorities are analyzed to evaluate how ADAS and Autonomous Driving fit into their scheme, elaborating on Euro NCAP 2025 roadmap and their new Assisted Driving protocol. It follows a description of the Toyota Safety Sense features, bundle of active safety technologies: Pre-Collision System, Lane Departure Alert, Automatic High Beams, Adaptive Cruise Control, Road Sign Assist and Lane Trace Assist. Accounting for the Toyota Safety Sense specs, with the addition of Blind Spot Monitor and Rear Cross Traffic Alert, a benchmark is deployed to evaluate their availability and degree of standardization in the main automotive car-makes in Europe. Successively, the research moves to the latest gradually emerging technologies in the market, identifying the main OEMs currently offering, deploying the respective functionalities on a feature-by-feature case study. Such studies are extremely relevant to support the development of features within the carmaker and to have benchmarking information with respect to the other OEMs systems. The dissertation concludes through an assessment of OTA (over-the-air) technology that allows to wirelessly update vehicle software. As OEMs move to more centralized architectures, OTA use cases gain relevance in reference to active safety features, providing the customer benefit of up-to-date vehicle during all its lifetime, improving the overall product experience.