Toyota Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC) announces 10 projects and six new partnerships

$50 Million initiative targets safety technology research

Toyota’s Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC), formed in January, announced 10 new research initiatives and new research agreements with six North American universities and research institutions to enhance the development, testing and implementation of new automotive safety innovations across North America.

The research initiatives build upon the CSRC’s focus of working to reduce the risk of driver distraction and better protect the most vulnerable traffic populations, including children, teens, seniors and pedestrians. Research projects range from driver education and collision mitigation to accident reconstruction and enhanced crash data analysis.

Chuck Gulash, senior executive engineer at the Toyota Technical Center and director of the CSRC, said the CSRC intends to publish as much of the research from its partnerships as possible to make it available to federal agencies, the industry and academia.

“This model of sharing the CSRC’s Toyota talent, technology, and data with a broad range of institutions, represents a fundamental change for Toyota, moving away from a traditional focus on proprietary research towards more openly sharing innovations that benefit the automotive industry and society as a whole.”

Along with previously announced partnerships with University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI), the new projects bring the total number of ongoing research programs to 13.  The CSRC initiative will operate on an initial funding budget of $50 million over five years, and hopes to announce additional partners and programs over the next year.

The CSRC today also announced the launch of its new website, www.toyota.com/csrc as part of Toyota’s Environmental, Safety and Quality (ESQ) Communications website (www.toyota.com/esq).  Featuring a cross section of information and research developments from ongoing work of the Center and its partners, the new site will serve as a publicly available hub for the CSRC’s collaborative research on automotive safety throughout North America.

The new CSRC collaborative safety technology research partners include:

1.         Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AgeLab, Cambridge, MA

2.         Transportation Active Safety Institute (TASI), Indiana University/Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)

3.         Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VT), Blacksburg, VA

4.         Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC

5.         Washtenaw Area Transportation Study (WATS), Ann Arbor, MI

6.         Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit, MI

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