Toyota tackles a new reality: Too much data

TOKYO — Lots of data is a mixed blessing when programming the autonomous cars of tomorrow.

Too little, and it is nearly impossible to develop software that can tackle the complexity of real life. Too much, and the blizzard of information is hard to analyze and prone to coding bugs.

Toyota Motor Corp., with annual sales eclipsing 10 million vehicles and tons of data streaming in from them, is no stranger to this conundrum.

Now its Woven Planet automated-driving subsidiary has additional firepower to manage the data and speed development of programmable cars. It will come from last week's acquisition of Renovo Motors Inc., a small Silicon Valley software firm with a niche for dicing and splicing complicated data streams in self-driving autos.

Renovo has only 30 employees, but Woven Planet CEO James Kuffner says Renovo's quality is what counts. The U.S. company's software expertise will allow Woven Planet to pull forward its timeline for creating an automotive software operating system by months, if not years.

"We want really, really rock-solid stability. So we have to invest in that kind of production quality," Kuffner said in announcing the acquisition. He said Renovo's know-how will help Woven Planet sift through the data, to test and validate automotive software faster and with fewer bugs.

"If we're talking about advanced safety, the automated-driving features of the future, how can I respond to the huge multidimensional complexity of our world of traffic?" Kuffner asked. "The only way is to have very powerful tools that scale much better than manual testing."

Woven Planet's upcoming automotive operating system, called Arene, is being pitched as an open software platform that will allow for "programmable cars." Woven hopes to offer it to other companies.

The company claims that Arene will be as groundbreaking in automotive as Microsoft Windows and Apple iOS were for personal computers and smartphones.

Kuffner said Woven Planet is already operating Arene in proof-of-concept vehicles and preproduction cars. It now expects to bring the software platform to the market by 2025, he said.

Renovo was ahead of Woven Planet in knowing how to analyze huge amounts of data quickly and create simulations, Kuffner said. So in keeping with Woven Planet's mission of rapid expansion, Kuffner reached out to buy the company rather than wait to cultivate the same skills in-house.

Just as Toyota has top-notch tooling to assemble a vehicle's hardware with bulletproof quality, Woven Planet wants cutting-edge tooling to develop foolproof software to run those cars.

Acquiring Renovo will allow the Toyota subsidiary to recover "orders of magnitude" of development costs over the long term, Kuffner predicted.

"We're really invested in how to equip engineers with the best tools so that they can create value faster with functional safety in mind," Kuffner said. "The fact is that the more complex software that you're trying to ship as part of your product, the greater the testing need."

Woven Planet did not disclose the cost of acquiring Renovo. It is Woven Planet's third major acquisition this year, as part of Kuffner's "go big or go home" strategy.

It follows July's purchase of Carmera Inc., an American high-definition digital mapping company, and a $550 million buyout in April of Level 5, the self-driving car unit of ride-hailing giant Lyft.

Toyota's move reflects the new reality that today's cars, programmed with hundreds of millions of lines of code, are essentially rolling computers. The complexity of their on-board systems is spiraling as vehicles use more chips and more code, and increasingly collect massive amounts of data from the on-board sensors that monitor the world as they drive down the street.

"Modern cars, with half a dozen cameras, can generate hundreds of gigabytes of data per day in raw data," said Renovo CEO Christopher Heiser. "When you take Toyota's annual production at 10 million cars, you realize that the raw data that that fleet, in just one year of production, would fill a really large Google data center every day.

"There's orders-of-magnitude too much data to be absorbed by the kind of computing infrastructure that we know and love in the cloud."

The central challenge to keeping software updated and reliable is being able to process all the data. That is where Renovo fits in. The sheer volume of data puts a premium on systems that can detect bugs and isolate what's important, ensuring that the new automotive operating system has superior reliability. Software platforms that run automobiles, where people's lives are at stake, can't afford the kind of glitches that people tolerate in their smartphones.

"With Renovo coming on board we have this big, big boost of energy and talent to really push forward," Kuffner said. "I am really optimistic that we will pull forward our plans."