We're still years away from fully self-driving cars, so car makers continue to focus on adding new safety features in a bid to reduce the risk of accidents occurring.
Toyota is taking safety a step further this year by adding the ability for its cars to ignore accelerator pedal input.
As Reuters reports, Toyota is responding to an increasingly common cause of accidents in its home country of Japan.
With the population there aging rapidly, elderly drivers can get confused and press the accelerator pedal when they intended to press the brake pedal.
Quickly responding to such a mistake is also difficult, which therefore leads to an accident.
Toyota's solution is called an "accelerator suppression function," and it relies on the huge amount of data Toyota has managed to collect from its internet-connected vehicles.
This so-called big data can be used to determine in any given situation on the road if the driver really did intend to press the accelerator pedal or not.
If it decides the wrong pedal was pressed, acceleration won't occur.
Taking control away from the driver could also be dangerous, but with 15 percent of fatal accidents in Japan caused by drivers over the age of 75, clearly new safety features are required.
Toyota must be confident that its acceleration suppression system has enough data and experience to always make the right decision to help avoid an accident.
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New Toyota cars in Japan will ship with the feature starting in the summer, but it's not yet known if Toyota vehicles in other markets will also come with accelerator suppression.
If it reduces the number of accidents in Japan this year, I'm sure Toyota will roll it out more widely.
It's also important to point out Toyota already uses accelerator suppression in a number of its vehicles, but it only triggers if an obstacle is detected.
