Toyota previews a Lexus that drives itself

Ahead of a debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we have video of an Autonomous Lexus – the Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle.

Even avid petrolheads have to admit that there are times when they’d rather let the car do the work, especially in congested urban environments. Wouldn’t it be good to stick the car in to auto drive when you’re stop-starting at 5mph and either have a kip or do some work?

Sadly, that’s not really the thinking behind the latest research in cars that can drive themselves, it’s more about taking control from the blobby organic mass behind the wheel (you) and giving it over to a computer, so more cars can travel more quickly with zero chance of an accident (well, unless the software goes pear-shaped).

Car makers (and Google) are busy working on autonomous cars that can take over from the driver, and Toyota has given us a glimpse of their research in this area with a (very short) video of the Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle – which looks to be a Lexus LS – ahead of its arrival at this year’s  Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Looking rather like a reject from Back to the Future, the autonomous Lexus sports a huge array of cameras and sensors to take the strain out of driving and let the car make the decisions.

So far all we have is a very brief 5 second video, but next week’s CES should see us learning just how far Lexus has got with their autonomous car efforts.

More then.