Toyota intends to bring hitchless towing to the U.S., a concept that sounds much like science fiction. Instead of a hitch bar, the Japanese carmaker will engineer vehicles to “follow the leader,” mimicking the exact moves of the car in front.
Toyota’s idea of a virtual hitch bar is interesting as a proof of concept and could be implemented with existing technologies. The idea is pretty straightforward and, as the name suggests, doesn’t involve using a hitch ball, hitch bar, safety chain connections, or any other physical component. Instead, the vehicle “in tow” would use its sensors to follow the car in front automatically. This means it can act as an autonomous vehicle of some sort, accelerating, braking, and turning as needed.
A video on Toyota’s media website shows two Toyota Sienna minivans demonstrating the hitchless towing concept. Although the video was uploaded in August, it is not publicly listed. Instead, it can be accessed with a direct link, or you can watch it below. For now, the two vehicles maintain a considerable distance between them, but this should improve. If not, having another vehicle slot in between would be awkward. Toyota didn’t provide technical details, but we assume the system must have some security built in. Otherwise, any vehicle can slot in between and hijack the “towed” car.
But then again, if this indeed involves a secure protocol to connect the two vehicles, it would only work for two Toyota vehicles. We still struggle to find use cases for the hitchless towing systems. One would be when you have two Toyotas in your household (not very common, but not unusual either) and want to take them both someplace at the same time. But because there still needs to be a driver in the second car, this is not different from driving the vehicles separately.
Besides that, towing means a different thing for most people. It is usually performed when the following vehicle cannot move under its own power. We don’t know how we’re supposed to convince a broken-down car to follow the leader in this case. A tow hitch would do the trick nicely, though. We’re not sure why Toyota thinks the North American market could benefit from this technology either. We’ll see how this goes, as Toyota will start testing the system on highways and in light urban traffic situations.
After his childhood dream of becoming a "tractor operator" didn't pan out, Cristian turned to journalism, first in print and later moving to online media. His top interests are electric vehicles and new energy solutions. Full profile
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