Legacy car company trying a “Silicon Valley-style” software unit with impossible ambitions running into the cold hard reality of needing to actually ship working software? Nope, not VW: this time it’s Toyota, whose Woven Planet software subsidiary working on CES-style nonsense ideas has basically hit the rocks.
Toyota named the concept Arene, a kind of operating system for cars that was envisioned as making it possible for drivers to wirelessly download a wide array of upgrades, just like Tesla. Arene-powered vehicles would connect to a cloud network, gathering and sharing data among millions of vehicles, smart homes and city infrastructure. Developers outside of Toyota would be able to use it to design their own applications and services for cars, and Arene would be open for use by other automakers as well, in the manner of Android, the mobile operating system that runs on many brands of smartphone.
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