At a press conference last week at CES, Toyota, led by Gill Pratt of DARPA fame and now CEO of Toyota Research Institute (TRI), informed the world what Toyota intended to do with it’s billion dollar investment in their new AI research facilities in Silicon Valley and Cambridge: “Up to now, our industry has measured on-road reliability of autonomous vehicles, in the millions of miles, which is impressive. But to achieve full autonomy we actually need reliability that is a million times better. We need trillion-mile reliability. Toyota has traditionally been a hardware company because in the past the most important technology for enhancing human mobility was hardware. Times have changed, and software and data are now essential components of Toyota’s future mobility strategy.” “It is entirely possible that robots will become for today’s Toyota what the car industry was when Toyota made looms. Home robots may be even more personally prized in our future than cars have been in our past. Toyota’s goal is to move people across the room, across town, and across the country.” "Our initial technical team directing research will include James Kuffner, CMU professor and former head of Google Robotics, who will be our area lead in cloud computing… [and also six others]." The portion of Pratt’s announcement that James Kuffner had left Google and was joining Toyota – and Pratt – was newsworthy in the robotics world. It showcased the changes in leadership stemming from the abrupt earlier departure from Google of Andy Rubin, the original leader who left after a buying spree that brought 8 robotic startups into Google. James Kuffner became the acting CEO of the Replicant robotics group which recently located within the Google X Lab. Conor Dougherty, in a NY Times article , wrote: Google’s robotics division has been […]