AsiaIndustrial NetNews: New energy has become the next outlet for the automotive industry. At present, the mainstream new energy vehicles on the market include electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. However, from the perspective of probability, it is only a matter of time before the birth of new battery materials in the future. Toyota seems to want to speed up the process. Toyota Motor recently announced that in the next four years, it will invest $35 million in the research and development of new energy battery materials based on artificial intelligence. In Toyota’s view, artificial intelligence (AI) will be a key way to find new energy future materials.
The strategy will be implemented by Toyota Research Institute (“TRI”), which was established in 2015 and has been focusing on AI-based driverless vehicle research and development since its inception. Today, Toyota hopes to use artificial intelligence to find new energy materials faster to further improve the performance of current car batteries and fuel cells.
Among the many mainstream automakers, Toyota is one of the main drivers of hydrogen fuel cells. Mirai, a subsidiary of Toyota, is recognized as the world’s first mass-produced hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, and its sales have been hot since its launch. And although it once criticized the impracticality of pure electric vehicles, following the Mirai, Toyota also wants to replicate this success in the pure electric vehicle market. According to Toyota’s official plan, before the end of 2020, the stubborn automaker will release a pure electric vehicle for mass production.
＊Exterior of Toyota Mirai
Will Toyota replicate today’s absolute leadership in hybrids at some point in the future? It doesn’t seem like it will, because Toyota has publicly disclosed about 5,680 fuel cell-related patents for free. However, for FCV, in addition to research and development technology, production technology is also a key.
The Toyota Research Institute will join forces with Stanford University, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the University of Michigan, the State University of Buffalo, the University of Connecticut, and the UK-based materials science company Ilika and other research institutions and departments to jointly undertake the energy materials project. research work. Toyota said it welcomes other institutional groups to join the project.
Toyota made it clear that finding entirely new materials could take decades. However, by incorporating artificial intelligence technology into its computational models, Toyota hopes to speed up the process. It is reported that artificial intelligence-based computational models, as a new method, have recently been applied to materials science research. According to Toyota’s official plan, by 2050, Toyota hopes to help reduce global carbon emissions by 90%. In order to achieve this goal, the performance of electric vehicles and fuel cell vehicles must be further improved, and the research and development of high-performance energy materials is used by Toyota. to unlock the key to this problem.
In recent years, Toyota has become one of the main drivers of artificial intelligence research. In 2015, Toyota announced that it would invest $50 million in joint research and development of future driverless car technology with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At this year’s CES conference, Toyota released the Concept-i, a self-driving concept car, equipped with the “Yui” artificial intelligence system, which supports voice interaction with drivers, expressing Toyota’s understanding of future cars and artificial intelligence.
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