Toyota Safety Sense exists because Toyota did its homework before building one of the world's most awarded driver-assist platforms. They have an entire division devoted to researching safety. In 2011, Toyota opened its Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC) and started focusing heavily on mobility safety. They work with research institutions, hospitals, and academic experts to study crash injury mitigation, driving behavior, and crash avoidance. The results speak for themselves.
Toyota Safety Research Center Completes 100th Project
Toyota's CSRC puts heavy emphasis on researching collision mitigation. Collisions take lives, and anything Toyota can do to protect drivers and passengers from these devastating events moves the field of vehicle safety forward. On June 3, 2025, Toyota announced that its collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Agelab marked the CSRC team's coveted 100th completed research project.
CSRC Director Danil Prokhorov took the time to reflect on this important achievement by saying, "This is a significant milestone for CSRC and our commitment to pursuing Toyota's vision of a future safe mobility society for all with the ultimate goal of zero traffic fatalities." MIT and Toyota's project included an exploration of driver and pedestrian behaviors when interacting with technology such as mobile phones or interior touchscreens.
The important 100th research project was aided by MIT AgeLab scientist Dr. Bryan Reimer and covered a substantial amount of collaborative work between Toyota and MIT. The results were outstanding and included research on voice-based human-machine interaction that produced a dataset of driver-pedestrian interaction. They also looked at driver assistance systems and behavior and observed non-driving-related task behavior.
Never content to stop at any breakthroughs in current research, Toyota's research center has already plotted out the next 10 projects. Very soon, Toyota will be working with the University of Waterloo, Oregon State University, Ohio State University Injury Biomechanics Research Center, and Auburn University. For now, Toyota is trying to take a moment to celebrate their safety team's latest achievement and devise ways to use the data from their 100th project to increase safety for their customers.
You can keep up with Toyota's latest achievements and projects here with us and dig deeper into the significance of Toyota and MIT's latest long-term collaboration.
Learn More About Toyota's Safety Milestone
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