(Bloomberg) -- The quest to build crash-proof cars at Toyota Motor Corp. isn’t just a job for Gill Pratt. It’s somewhat personal. Pratt still vividly remembers encountering the aftermath of a collision between a boy on a bicycle and a car that traversed a four-lane road as he walked home from elementary school in Springfield, New Jersey.
“The part that I remember the most were his shoes,” Pratt, 54, said in an interview in November, after Toyota announced he’d lead its $1 billion research institute. “His shoes on the road, those were what was left of him.”
Handpicked by President Akio Toyoda to serve as CEO of the Toyota Research Institute Inc., Pratt is building a dream team in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence to design vehicles capable of overcoming driver errors and curtailing the 1.25 million road-traffic deaths that occur every year, according to the World Health Organization.
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