Waymo

2 days agoNews Editor

Waymo and Toyota team up to roll out robotaxi service in Japan and the UK

Waymo and Toyota have announced a partnership to deploy autonomous taxi services in Japan and the United Kingdom using Toyota's bZ4X electric vehicle. Under the agreement announced Friday, Toyota will build the 2027 bZ4X at its factories in Japan and integrate Waymo's self-driving system into the vehicle. The companies said the autonomous vehicles will first be tested in Japan before expanding to other right-hand-drive markets, including the UK. Waymo has already been testing its autonomous Jaguar I-Pace vehicles in London for several months and plans to launch a taxi service there once it secures the required approvals. Toyota Executive Vice President Hiroki Nakajima said the partnership is intended to scale the technology and bring it to customers in Japan and other regions through Waymo's ride-hailing service.

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Toyota

2 months agoNews Editor

Toyota says factory automation push could require 400,000 robots by 2028

Toyota Motor said expanding automation across its factories, group companies and key suppliers could require about 400,000 robots by 2028, with annual spending of roughly 1 trillion yen, or about $6.4 billion. The company discussed the potential plan with investors in early September, though it has not confirmed whether it will commit the full amount or how many years that level of spending would continue. The estimate covers both replacement of existing equipment and new installations, including humanoid and non-humanoid systems. The potential scope spans industrial robots, automated logistics and human-robot collaboration on future factory floors. Toyota has already deployed and tested robotics in multiple manufacturing processes. The company uses the term "physical AI" for technology that lets robots sense their surroundings through sensors, learn from conditions or optimize movements, and operate autonomously. Its frontier research center is using robotics to address labor shortages and skills transfer, with the technology already applied in systems such as the KumiPro parts-picking robot, according to Reuters.

660

Toyota

25 days agoNews Editor

Akio Toyoda says an all-EV shift is his biggest fear as Toyota's BEV sales double but still make up only 4%

Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda said in a June interview with UK auto outlet Carwow that his biggest fear was seeing everyone move to battery electric vehicles, adding that he still loves the sound, smell, and feel of combustion engines. Four months later, Toyota's own sales data showed the group's EV business had grown sharply, but it remained a small part of the company's global mix. Toyota and Lexus sold 267,649 battery electric vehicles from January through August, up about 129% from a year earlier and already above the 199,137 units sold in all of last year. Even so, BEVs accounted for only about 4.0% of the group's 6,655,766 total global sales over the same period. Hybrids remained the main pillar, with 3,093,426 units sold, up 5.3% year on year, representing about 46.5% of total sales. The company said the bigger drag on performance came from China rather than EV adoption itself. Toyota and Lexus sold 927,866 vehicles in China in the first eight months of the year, down 18.8% year on year, while August sales in China fell 22.8%. In contrast, North America, Europe, and Japan all posted modest gains over the same period.

660

BitGo Bank & Trust

2 months agoNews Editor

BitGo Bank & Trust backs TOYOSA stablecoin payments for Toyota purchases in Bolivia

BitGo Bank & Trust has partnered with Bolivian auto dealer TOYOSA to support stablecoin payments for Toyota vehicle purchases, according to Techub News, which cited Crypto Briefing. The brief report says the arrangement is intended to use digital assets as a way to address local economic challenges. No additional details on the payment flow, supported stablecoins, or rollout timeline were disclosed in the source item. The update centers on the use of crypto-linked payment rails in a retail auto sales setting in Bolivia, with TOYOSA positioned as the accepting dealer and BitGo Bank & Trust as the banking and custody-side partner named in the report.

610

yen

3 months agoNews Editor

Yen Weakness Lifts Japanese Exporters as Record Number of Firms Raise Earnings Forecasts

Japanese multinationals are cashing in on a weaker yen, prompting a wave of earnings forecast upgrades in the latest reporting season. Toyota, Honda, Sony and Ryohin Keikaku have all revised their guidance higher. Okasan Securities data shows 159 of about 1,600 Topix constituents have raised full-year forecasts since July 1, versus just 12 downgrades — an adjustment ratio of 86%, the highest since fiscal 2016.

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Toyota

4 months agoNews Editor

Toyota spinout Walden Robotics emerges with $300 million seed round at $1.1 billion valuation

Walden Robotics, a startup spun out of Toyota Research Institute in January, emerged from stealth on July 15 with a $300 million seed round and an $1.1 billion valuation. The financing was co-led by Toyota and Deviation Capital, with participation from NVIDIA, Boeing, Samsung Ventures, Prologis Ventures and CoreWeave Ventures. The company reached unicorn status in about six months. Led by co-founder and CEO Russ Tedrake, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who previously led TRI’s robotics and machine learning team for nearly a decade, Walden is built on research that includes Diffusion Policy, Universal Manipulation Interface, Large Behavior Models, OpenVLA and the open-source simulator Drake. Its founding team also includes CTO Ben Burchfiel, COO Kerri Fetzer-Borelli, Chief Product Officer Dave Johnson, Chief Strategy Officer Adrien Gaidon, Chief Architect Siyuan Feng and AI lead Rares Ambrus. Walden’s pitch centers on commercializing TRI’s robotics work inside real production environments, starting with Toyota’s manufacturing system. The company says its Large Behavior Models are designed to let robots learn and transfer skills across tasks instead of being programmed one workflow at a time. TRI’s prior research used nearly 1,700 hours of robot data, 1,800 real-world tests and more than 47,000 simulation tests. Walden is combining autonomous operation with remote human assistance as it pushes those systems into factories and warehouses.

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Kioxia

4 months agoNews Editor

Kioxia shares tumble more than 50% from June peak, wiping out 30 trillion yen in market value

Kioxia, Japan’s major memory chip maker, fell sharply in intraday trading on Friday, with the stock down 16.1% at one point and now more than 50% below its June peak. According to the figures cited in the report, the company has lost over 30 trillion yen, or about $185 billion, in market value within a month. Nikkei said Kioxia Holdings had briefly become Japan’s most valuable listed company in mid-June after surging more than 600% from the start of the year and overtaking Toyota Motor. The company has since slipped to fourth place, adding to concerns that the AI-driven rally may have run too far, too fast. Daiwa Securities chief strategist Yugo Tsuboi said the memory industry is highly exposed to business cycles and that similar episodes have played out before. He also pointed to growing attention on Chinese memory makers, concerns that the global memory price upswing could begin to slow, and the earlier exit of major shareholder Bain Capital as factors that left Kioxia’s stock on weaker footing. The report added that some analysts still see room for gains over the next 12 months, underscoring a split view on the company’s longer-term value.

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NVIDIA

4 months agoNews Editor

NVIDIA expands Toyota partnership to smart vehicles, robotics and city traffic systems

NVIDIA said it is deepening its partnership with Toyota to bring AI and hardware technologies into vehicles, robotics and infrastructure. The collaboration starts with in-vehicle systems, where Toyota is using NVIDIA DRIVE HDX and DRIVE AGX, running DriveOS, to build next-generation smart vehicles with L2+ to L2++ advanced driving and situational awareness functions. Toyota is also adopting a code-assist AI model trained on NVIDIA Megatron-LM technology and the Nemotron dataset to help engineers generate, review and verify in-vehicle software under strict industry compliance requirements. The work also covers manufacturing and urban infrastructure. Toyota is using NVIDIA Omniverse and Isaac Sim to build digital twins of factory production lines under a simulation-first development model. In Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture, Toyota subsidiary Woven by Toyota is developing the Woven City AI Vision Engine with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and the Megatron-Core framework for traffic control and mobility forecasting. NVIDIA separately said it is expanding its Jetson AGX Thor lineup for robots and widening deployment of its open-source Nemotron model to companies including NTT DATA and Hitachi.

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