June 2, 2026 - 15 Years of Toyota Collaborative Safety Research Center

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for June 2, 2026, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry. 

Twenty-twenty-six marks the 15th anniversary of the establishment of Toyota's Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC). This program was launched in 2011 to enable Toyota to partner with universities on transportation safety-related projects that are designed to be shared with the industry. The outcome of all the research is published and made available for others to build on. The CSRC is based out of Toyota's Technical Center in Saline, Michigan, which employs over 2,000 people. 

Since it began, Toyota has invested more than $115 million in more than 120 projects covering a wide range of topics. Numerous projects have involved the use and enhancement of the Total Human Model for Safety, or THUMS. The goal of THUMS, which was first launched by Toyota in 2001, is to have, essentially, a digital twin of the human body for use in safety simulations. The model can be scaled to any size, weight, or shape of human body, extending well beyond what is available for standard physical crash dummies. 

Over the years of research, THUMS has been enhanced to improve the fidelity of the model to match the way bodies actually respond. At a presentation at Toyota today, Principal Scientist Dr. Zhaonan Sun discussed research he did under a CSRC grant while still at the University of Virginia to study the behavior of subcutaneous adipose tissue, which is commonly known as fat tissue. It turns out to have very unique kinematic characteristics. More recently at Toyota, he has been using THUMS to study pedestrian injuries when struck by a vehicle. He characterized a number of physical factors of vehicles, such as hood and bumper height and angles, and then varied those along with vehicle speed to determine injury severity. This has yielded data showing that taller hoods and higher speeds lead to a significantly higher likelihood of injury and supports the case for pedestrian detection and automatic emergency braking.  

Toyota has announced 10 new CSRC projects with seven universities, including how adaptive interfaces can increase driver adoption of advanced safety systems, new methods for detecting pedestrians and cyclists, how speeding risk varies by road type, and the gap between a driver’s speed and posted limits. 

Thanks for listening.