Nikkei Cross Tech publishes exclusive interview with Toyota CTO Hiroki Nakajima

On September 10, 2026, Nikkei Cross Tech published an exclusive interview with Hiroki Nakajima, chief technology officer (CTO) and executive vice president of Toyota Motor Corp. The article covers his approach to development speed amid a new competitive environment shaped by the rapid evolution of AI, as well as autonomous driving and robot development.

The fact that Toyota’s CTO discussed autonomous driving and robot development in the same interview offers a clue to how the company may reorganize its development operations for the AI era. The original article is needed for details of his remarks, but it confirms that development speed is an issue for both vehicles and robots.

The article conveys Toyota Motor Corp.’s thinking on technology development through remarks by CTO Hiroki Nakajima. Its main focus is how to advance three areas—AI, autonomous driving and robotics—in parallel, rather than simply introducing new products. Specific technical details and figures cannot be confirmed from the excerpt, however, so the original article should be consulted for more information. In related coverage by this newspaper, Toyota had already announced its in-house development of autonomous driving and use of multiple approaches in [Toyota adopts its own hybrid approach to end-to-end autonomous driving, combining single-model, modular and rule-based methods](/en/news/toyota-develops-its-own-approach-to-end-to-end-autonomous-driving-cef12d). The significance of this interview is that the discussion shifts, as a continuation of that effort, to the operational question of how to increase development speed. In other words, the next issue is how to accelerate the cycles of training, validation and implementation, beyond selecting an approach. Meanwhile, the robot development shown in Toyota unveils new basketball robot CUE7, achieving natural dribbling through reinforcement learning emphasizes real-world motion data and accumulated learning. Autonomous driving and robotics may seem like separate fields, but they are connected by the fact that real-world data, the number of trials and accumulated failures are sources of competitive strength in both. Nakajima’s remarks offer a basis for considering whether Toyota intends to bring the two together as a shared technology platform rather than treat them as separate topics. One implication for the industry is that automakers are treating the design of development processes themselves as a competitive factor, not just focusing on software and AI. In autonomous driving, validation environments are important alongside algorithms; in robotics, collecting training data matters as well as mechanical design. The focus will be on what companies keep in-house and where they partner with outside organizations. The excerpt alone does not make this clear, but production plans, validation systems and the handling of training data will be points to watch.

For Japanese automakers and parts suppliers, development speed and the accumulation of real-world data could become competitive factors alongside vehicle performance. If Toyota discusses autonomous driving and robotics together, building systems that span mechanical components, controls and validation environments emerges as a challenge for Japanese companies.