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| Toyota wants to accelerate the development of self-driving technology |
Toyota's Woven Planet has acquired Renovo, a startup that makes operating systems for self-driving cars.
This is the latest acquisition to accelerate Toyota's mission to use connected software to develop self-driving cars. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Woven Planet was founded by Toyota in January 2021 to invest in and develop artificial intelligence.
The company has since been in the acquisition phase, acquiring Carmera, which provides high-resolution, real-time maps and data for self-driving cars, and Lyft's Level 5 self-driving car division.
Renovo is headquartered in Silicon Valley, and its operating system brings together all the software needed to run autonomous fleets.
Renovo was founded in 2010 by Chris Heizer and Jason Stinson and has been involved in many automobile projects for many years.
There's also the Renovo Coupé, a $529,000 high-performance electric sports car with 0.3 watt-hours of torque and acceleration from 0 to 100 km/h in 3.4 seconds, or the Project DeLorean Cabriolet with an electric motor.
"We want to reduce viable products that will be available for years and months," Woven Planet said. The long-term goal is to develop software and operating systems that other car manufacturers use.
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Renovo has recently developed an autonomous car system that can monitor driver attention and facial expressions of passengers and pedestrians to better understand how they are feeling inside and outside the car.
The company has partnered with an artificial intelligence startup called Affectiva to integrate this technology into its test fleet.
Renovo strives to be the AWS for self-driving cars. The operating system called AWare enables self-driving cars to process large amounts of sensor data.
Renovo is also partnering with Samsung to test, develop and deploy self-driving cars for the smartphone giant.
The Japanese company is in a technology race with other well-known automakers and new competitors like Tesla to build driverless cars and share data over a networked network.
Although there are some self-driving cars, their self-driving functions are mostly limited to parking and driving on the highway.