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Thursday, October 31, 2019

Toyota Financial Services Offers Payment Relief to Customers Affected by California Wildfires and Texas Tornadoes



Toyota Financial Services (TFS) announced it is offering payment relief options to its customers affected by the recent series of wildfires throughout California, as well as the tornadoes which struck northern Texas earlier this month. This broad outreach includes any Toyota Financial Services (TFS) or Lexus Financial Services (LFS) customer in the designated disaster areas.
In addition, to assist with recovery efforts for the tornadoes in Texas, Toyota is donating $100,000 to Dallas Independent School District (DISD). To assist with the wildfires in California, Toyota is giving $50,000 to American Red Cross and $50,000 to California Community Foundation’s Wildfire Relief Fund.
Toyota Financial Services cares about the safety and well-being of its customers, and wants to help those impacted by these natural disasters.  Impacted lease and finance customers residing in the devastated areas may be eligible to take advantage of several payment relief options, some of which include:
  • extensions and lease deferred payments
  • redirecting billing statements
  • arranging phone or online payments
Toyota Financial Services will proactively attempt to contact customers via email or telephone in the affected areas to assess their needs and inform customers of the options available to them.
Customers who would like to discuss their account options are encouraged to contact TFS or LFS:
Toyota Financial Services customers may call 800-874-8822 or contact TFS via email using the Mail Center function after logging into ToyotaFinancial.com. 
Lexus Financial Services customers may call 800-874-7050 or contact LFS via email using the Mail Center function after logging into LexusFinancial.com.
We extend our heartfelt thoughts to those affected by these devastating disasters.

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Toyota to Offer Rides in SAE Level-4 Automated Vehicles on Public Roads in Japan Next Summer

Demonstration to illustrate Toyota’s “mobility as a service” concept
Rides will be available from July to September in Tokyo’s busy Odaiba district

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) announced today that its Platform 4 (P4) automated driving test vehicle will be available for public demonstration rides next summer in Tokyo. Offered from July to September 2020, the P4 will demonstrate Toyota’s “Chauffeur” SAE Level-4 capabilities in a specific “mobility as a service” (MaaS) driving environment.
The P4 experience will take place in Tokyo’s Odaiba district, a busy and often congested waterfront subcenter. Odaiba’s complex environment of pedestrians, vehicle traffic, diverse road infrastructure and tall glass buildings provide a challenging setting in which to demonstrate the capabilities of Toyota’s automated driving technology. The public will be invited to register for the experience, and individuals will be selected to participate. In accordance with Japanese law, a Safety Driver will be present during the experience.
“By challenging ourselves to successfully operate autonomously in Odaiba, we have set a high bar that requires us to rapidly expand the capabilities of our technology in a short amount of time,” said TRI CEO Gill Pratt.  “To accomplish that, we are working closely with the Advanced R&D Division of Toyota Motor Corporation and Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development (TRI-AD) based in Tokyo, who is responsible for bringing the P4’s automated driving software to the public.”
TRI has been testing the P4 in the United States at its Ottawa Lake, Michigan, closed-course test facility.  There, TRI replicated Odaiba’s most challenging infrastructure characteristics and driving scenarios for which the P4 will have to navigate autonomously. Further testing of P4 software is being conducted on public roads in Odaiba and around TRI’s Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Los Altos, California, research offices.
Introduced at CES® 2019, the P4 test vehicle is based on the fifth-generation Lexus LS sedan. It is being used in TRI’s research and development of both “Toyota Guardian™” active safety and “Chauffeur” automated driving applications.

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Coupe-Inspired Design Modernizes All-New 2021 Toyota Mirai Sedan Concept

Design and Technology Flagship Delivers Significant Evolution of Toyota’s Hydrogen Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle Powertrain
  • Elegant New Mirai Concept Based on Premium RWD Platform
  • Upgraded FCEV Powertrain with Enhanced Performance
  • Target of 30-Percent Increase in Driving Range with Increased Hydrogen Capacity
  • Enhanced Safety and Tech Features
  • Companion Model to Toyota’s Upcoming Battery EVs

Toyota put the auto industry on the road to electrification in 1997 with the first Prius hybrid. Then, in 2015, it debuted the Mirai, the first production hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicle (FCEV) offered for sale to retail customers in North America (Mirai means “future” in Japanese). Now, Toyota has revealed the second-generation Mirai, rebooted as a premium sedan with cutting-edge design, technology and driving performance.
The Mirai is based on Toyota’s premium rear-wheel drive platform and debuts a dramatic yet refined coupe-inspired design with improved passenger room and comfort. The second-gen Mirai will go on sale in late 2020 and will deliver a significant evolution of Toyota’s hydrogen FCEV powertrain technology and offer a critical look into the future of Toyota’s lineup.
The dramatic change in design also signals a new driving experience from Mirai. A targeted 30-percent increase in range is achieved by an improvement in fuel cell system performance and increased hydrogen storage capacity. Additionally, the new Mirai will offer a more powerful, engaging and even quieter driving experience than its pioneering forerunner.
“We have pursued making a car that customers feel like driving all the time, a car that has emotional and attractive design appeal, as well as dynamic and responsive driving performance that can bring a smile to the faces of drivers,” said Yoshikazu Tanaka, Chief Engineer of the Mirai. “I want customers to say, ‘I chose the Mirai not because it’s an FCEV, but because I really wanted this car, and it just happened to be an FCEV.’”
At its core, the Mirai is an electric vehicle, but it never needs to be plugged in to recharge. An FCEV generates its own electricity onboard from hydrogen & oxygen, with water as the only tailpipe emission. A fill-up takes just about five minutes at an SAE-conforming hydrogen fueling station in California or Hawaii (with stations also planned for the Northeast and other areas).
Toyota is working to develop a line of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and includes FCEVs in its electrification roadmap. Toyota projects that fuel cell electric technology will one day be as common as the company’s hybrid electric technology.
Electrifying Style
The second-generation Mirai is built on a rear-wheel drive platform, a major departure from the original front-wheel drive version in terms of design. The new platform allows for a highly rigid body that is lower, longer, and wider, with its bolder stance accentuated by available 20-inch alloy wheels. The design is more aerodynamic, yet also emotionally evocative without being aggressive; zero-emissions doesn’t have to mean dull.
The new Mirai’s clean, modern profile was inspired by coupes, yet the new design is also more approachable than before. By taking advantage of the new platform, there’s more interior space which allows for five passenger seating for more family flexibility.
Accentuating the new Mirai’s smoother, more sculptural form is a brand-new blue color never before featured on a Toyota which achieves its brightness and deepness through a multiple-layer painting process.
The new Mirai’s interior matches the refined tone of the exterior, its clean and modern layout infused with a hint of futurism without appearing off-putting. Drivers of current conventional luxury models will feel immediately familiar behind the wheel of the new Mirai. To that end, Toyota made the cabin even quieter, enhancing the luxurious ambience.
The simple, flowing lines of the dash neatly integrate a higher level of user tech in the new Mirai, including a standard 8-inch digital combination meter and available digital rearview mirror that displays images from a rear camera. The standard Toyota Premium Multimedia system, which uses a 12.3-inch high-resolution TFT touchscreen, includes navigation and a 14-speaker JBL sound system.
Toyota’s Fuel Cell Future
Toyota remains committed to hydrogen fuel cell technology as a powertrain with tremendous potential. It’s a scalable technology, which means it can be made small enough to power a phone or large enough to power a building, or anything in between. For example, Toyota installed fuel cell powertrains into a test fleet of Kenworth class-8 semi-trucks that can pull a maximum 80,000-lb. load. These powerful, zero-emission big rigs are currently used for moving freight in and around the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, California.
More FCEVs are planned to enter the market over the next few years, as the cost, size and weight of fuel cell systems continue to decrease and the fueling infrastructure grows. Among the advantages of FCEV technology is a quick refueling time (about the same as conventional gasoline-fueled vehicles).
What’s an FCEV?
Even motorists familiar with EVs may still be unacquainted with FCEVs. The easiest way to understand an FCEV is that it is a “plug-less” electric vehicle. There’s no need to charge the battery, which can take several hours in an EV, even with fast charging. Instead, the FCEV driver simply fills the tank in about five minutes, not much longer than millions do every day with conventional vehicles.
With an FCEV, however, the fuel is compressed hydrogen rather than gasoline. A fuel cell system combines the stored hydrogen with oxygen from the air, and the result is (1) electric current, (2) heat, and (3) water.
Fuel cell technology predates the automobile by more than half a century. In 1839, a Welsh physicist combined hydrogen and oxygen in the presence of an electrolyte and produced an electric current. By the 1960s, the technology was being used in America’s Gemini and Apollo spacecraft, where it provided crews with both electricity and water from stored hydrogen and oxygen. It is used widely in a variety of industries and applications around the world. Hydrogen can be produced locally and sustainably.
Fuel cells had been studied for the automotive sector, but the technology only recently became practical and cost-effective. Toyota began its fuel cell development around the same time as the original Prius 20+ years ago, and the Mirai shares some of the technology & components from the company’s hybrid program. Toyota developed the solid-polymer electrolyte fuel cells used in the first- and second-generation Mirai models, and, to help foster FCEV proliferation, the company has released its patents, royalty-free.
The fuel cell is composed of an anode, a cathode, and an electrolyte membrane. Hydrogen is passed through the anode, and oxygen through the cathode. The hydrogen molecules are split into electrons and protons. As protons pass through the electrolyte membrane, electrons travel along a circuit, generating an electric current and heat. At the cathode, the protons, electrons, and oxygen combine to produce water molecules. There are no other byproducts, just pure water.

Sunday, October 20, 2019

Toyota Announces new AI Automated “LQ” Concept

LQ

Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) today announced the "LQ", a concept vehicle that leverages advanced technology to build an emotional bond between car and driver. The next generation of the Toyota "Concept-i", a concept vehicle first exhibited at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show, LQ is equipped with automated driving capabilities and "Yui," a powerful artificial intelligence-powered interactive agent designed to learn from the driver and deliver a personalized mobility experience.





"In the past, our love for cars was built on their ability to take us to distant places and enable our adventures," said LQ development leader Daisuke Ido. "Advanced technology gives us the power to match customer lifestyles with new opportunities for excitement and engagement. With the LQ, we are proud to propose a vehicle that can deliver a personalized experience, meet each driver's unique mobility needs, and build an even stronger bond between car and driver."

As a mobility company, Toyota believes that when people are free to move, anything is possible. This vision is built on an understanding that mobility goes beyond physical transportation to include the human need to be moved and engaged emotionally.

LQ follows this philosophy under a core development theme of "Learn, Grow, Love." Yui and LQ's automated driving technology, both developed in partnership with Toyota Research Institute (TRI), combine to create a unique mobility experience that builds the relationship between vehicle and driver by learning from and responding to individual preferences and needs. The name expresses Toyota's hope that this approach will "cue" the development of future vehicles that enhance the relationship between car and driver.

LQ will be on public display at the "Future Expo", a special exhibition of the 2019 Tokyo Motor Show1 from October 24 to November 4. In addition, Toyota today announced "Toyota Yui Project Tours 2020", a public test-drive event scheduled to run from June to September 2020. The public will have the opportunity to register for a chance to be selected to experience the LQ and the "Yui" AI. By using a smartphone app in advance to provide their interests and preferences, selected participants will join a test drive of the "LQ" with "Yui".

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Top 3 Halloween Candies for Washington State


According to candy authorities at MentalFloss, trick or treaters of Washington State get the most excited when they get some salt water taffy dropped into their plastic pumpkin buckets.

See the source imageSo much so, that we consumer nearly 221,000 pounds of it.

We have to admit, we were a little surprised at this as a quick survey revealed almost no one could recall ever receiving salt water taffy as they tallied their Halloween booty as kids.

A not close second place, according to the article, was Tootsie Pops with 195,600 pounds being
consumed.

Third place belongs to Skittles at 72,000 pounds...although we think that amount was probably higher a few years ago when there was a certain rainbow eating runningback playing for the Seahawks.
What do you think? Did your favorite candy make the top 3 on this list?

Monday, October 14, 2019

Burien Legends, Haunts, and Activities for Halloween!

 If the explosion in the spider population or sudden appearance of Hocus Pocus t-shirts didn't alert you, we can officially celebrate all things spooky now that it's October!

Except spiders.

There is a lot going on to satisfy your spooky needs from kid fun to something for more mature audiences. For the family, you may want to check out the Haunted Hike hosted by Burien Boy Scout Troop 360 on October 13! The Macaroni website is a great way to find other festive family-friendly activities, too.

Before we get to our list of haunted places (not fake haunted houses, but actually haunted places in the area), do you know the local urban legend of the Drowned Girl of Miller Creek in Burien? The story has it that around 1915 a young girl was playing near Miller Creek when a log dam broke up stream and swept her away. Allegedly, she is a benign spirit who you can hear softly giggle on sunny days after big storms. Who's going to go check that out this month?

Finally, here's a link to a list of the most haunted places you can visit in the Burien area. The list includes places like Calamity Jane's western saloon, the old train station in Kent, and the Seattle Underground Tunnels. Who's ready for a spooky date night?!

Monday, October 7, 2019

TRI Teaching Robots to Help People in their Homes



The world’s population is aging at a dramatic rate with global implications.  Public policy plays a key role in addressing the socioeconomic impact of the demographic shift. But we believe advances in robotic capabilities will be critical to enabling people to age in place longer and live a higher quality life.
The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) is focused on creating and proving the technological breakthroughs necessary to make assistive home robots feasible.  In 2015, Gill Pratt, our CEO, professed that the key to the Cambrian explosion of robotics is the combination of cloud robotics and deep learning.  This is called fleet learning: if we enable one robot to learn to perform a task, either from a person or in simulation, and then share this knowledge with all other robots, such that they can perform the task in new situations, we can achieve an exponential increase in robotic capabilities.
Earlier this year, Russ Tedrake, TRI’s VP of Robotics Research, posted why simulation is one key aspect for achieving fleet learning and ensuring we can maintain the reliability needed as robots learn.  Another is the ability for a person to teach a robot how to perform a task, leveraging human intelligence and insight to guide the robot’s physical ability.  To help motivate this aspect of fleet learning, we posed a research challenge to teach a general purpose robot to perform useful human-level tasks in real homes.
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Operating and navigating in home environments is very challenging for robots.  Every home is unique, with a different combination of objects in distinct configurations that change over time.  To address the diversity a robot faces in a home environment, we teach the robot to perform arbitrary tasks with a variety of objects, rather than program the robot to perform specific predefined tasks with specific objects.  In this way, the robot learns to link what it sees with the actions it is taught.  When the robot sees a specific object or scenario again, even if the scene has changed slightly, it knows what actions it can take with respect to what it sees.
We teach the robot using an immersive telepresence system, in which there is a model of the robot, mirroring what the robot is doing.  The teacher sees what the robot is seeing live, in 3D, from the robot’s sensors.  The teacher can select different behaviors to instruct and then annotate the 3D scene, such as associating parts of the scene to a behavior, specifying how to grasp a handle, or drawing the line that defines the axis of rotation of a cabinet door.  When teaching a task, a person can try different approaches, making use of their creativity to use the robot’s hands and tools to perform the task. This makes leveraging and using different tools easy, allowing humans to quickly transfer their knowledge to the robot for specific situations.
Historically, robots, like most automated cars, continuously perceive their surroundings, predict a safe path, then compute a plan of motions based on this understanding.  At the other end of the spectrum, new deep learning methods compute low-level motor actions directly from visual inputs, which requires a significant amount of data from the robot performing the task.  We take a middle ground. Our teaching system only needs to understand things around it that are relevant to the behavior being performed. Instead of linking low-level motor actions to what it sees, it uses higher-level behaviors.  As a result, our system does not need prior object models or maps. It can be taught to associate a given set of behaviors to arbitrary scenes, objects, and voice commands from a single demonstration of the behavior.   This also makes the system easy to understand and makes failure conditions easy to diagnose and reproduce.
Our robot is specifically designed to make teaching and performing these tasks easy.  Like a person, it has many redundant degrees of freedom, ensuring the robot can move its hands around in the way that it wants, whenever it wants, by adjusting its whole body posture to accommodate the motions.  The robot also has a set of visual and depth cameras with a very wide field of view.  This provides a significant amount of context to both the person teaching the robot, and the robot itself.
Our teaching and testing occurs in actual homes.  This is critical to achieving sufficient capability and reliability.  Our robots are research prototypes, and we select tasks for the robot that motivate and advance algorithm development, rather than demonstrate product concepts.  With knowledge gained from our experiments, we constantly iterate and adjust how we are approaching the problems, both in hardware and software.  Right now, our system can successfully perform a relatively complex human-level task about 85% of the time.  This includes letting the robot automatically try again if it recognizes that it has failed at a specific behavior.  Each task is made up of about 45 independent behaviors, which means that every individual behavior results in success, or recoverable failure 99.6% of the time.
Our approach could easily extend beyond homes and be applied to other environments.  For example, a person could quickly and remotely teach an industrial arm in a factory to perform repetitive manufacturing tasks, or rapidly adjust a pick-move-pack task for a logistics robot.  A key limitation of our approach is that taught tasks cannot currently generalize to other robots or different situations.  However, we believe teaching a robot tasks is a promising first step to achieving our broader vision of Fleet Learning, specifically for assisting and empowering people in their home.  And we hope that sharing the progress we have made benefits others throughout the robotics community.  The technical details of our system are described in depth in a preprint of a publication.

Friday, October 4, 2019

Toyota of Burien's Favorite Pumpkin Patches!


Fall is officially here in the Pacific Northwest! How do we know? Pumpkin spice everything. The chill in the air in the morning...and sweat by the afternoon. More gray and rain.

And PUMPKIN PATCHES at all the local farms!

It isn't really fall until after the traditional visit to one of our amazing local farms that pull out all the stops to make sure visitors have a fall-bulous time. Here are some of our favorite farms and activities with links to their websites:
Carpinito Brothers Farm in Kent
What we love to do there:

  • The corn maze (just make sure you give the kids a cell phone. Or don't...)
  • Shop at the country store for our many fall favorite foods
  • The Rubber Duck Races at the Farm Fun Yard
  • Rodeo Ropin Cows
Fox Hollow Farm in Issaquah
What we love to do there:
  • See the cute animals at this animal sanctuary!
  • Pumpkin pie and fresh apple cider from their cafe (what's more fall than that?)
  • Tractor hay ride
  • Watching the salmon swim up stream in their creek!
Mosby Farms in Auburn
What we love to do there:
  • Bring your doggo, they're pet friendly! (Remember to scoop the poop)
  • 50th anniversary of Man on the Moon corn maze!
  • An epic u-pick pumpkin patch
What are some of your favorite local fall activities?
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