A new company is planning on opening a closed-course testing facility for autonomous vehicles, we’re talking about The Toyota Research Institute. The 60-acre site, will open in October at the Michigan Technical Resource Park. It will be used to reproduce scenarios that are too risky to execute on public roads.
A TRI spokesman declined to comment on the details of the agreement with the resource park, including the cost of the arrangement and the length of the lease. TRI plans to lease the track, and the land in the inner ring, from the Michigan Technical Resource Park, or MITRP.The 50-year-old track had been used for decades by auto supplier Dana Corp., which is based several miles away near Toledo. FCA US currently uses the site for vehicle storage, with thousands of mostly Ram trucks and Jeep SUVs parked along the track.
The facility will be designed inside the park's 1.75-mile oval test track, and TRI also will have access to other on-site facilities and services. MITRP will maintain responsibility for the oval itself and everything else outside of the oval infield, Toyota said.
