At a CES press conference yesterday, Toyota presented its semi-autonomous Lexus Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle, a car designed to take over from you when an accident is imminent to keep you in one piece.

     To be clear, this is a research vehicle, and it’s not designed to turn into a Google-style autonomous car. It’s more about a high-level of driver assistance, with the car using sensors and intelligence to augment what its human driver is doing. Think of it as a co-pilot, essentially, there to point things out and give you help when you need it.

     Existing high-end Lexus passenger cars already use cameras and radar and lasers and GPS for things like blind-spot awareness, lane detection, and adaptive cruise, and the Lexus research vehicle just takes all that to the next level in both hardware and software. It can detect other vehicles, track what they’re doing, and even tell red lights from green. [read more..]