Last week, Toyota detailed a 5-year, $50-million commitment to a variety of collaborative safety research projects and gave a tour of their new $38-million technical center near Ann Arbor, MI. Toyota engineers at the Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC) will deploy on ten new projects with six different universities and research institutions to advance safety understanding and develop and test new technical innovations.

Toyota expects the projects to span 2011- 2015, but Toyota said unlike in the past, they plan to share much of what they learn to other institutions.

“In keeping with its collaborative, open research model, the CSRC intends to publish as much of the research from its partnerships as possible to make it available to federal agencies, the industry and academia,” said Chuck Gulash, Senior Executive Enginner at the Toyota Technical Center and Director of the CSRC. “This model of sharing the CSRC’s Toyota talent, technology, and data with a broad range of institutions, represents a fundamental change for Toyota, moving away from a traditional focus on proprietary research towards more openly sharing innovations that benefit the automotive industry and society as a whole.”

The ten newly established safety-research partnerships span a wide range of disciplines including a program with MIT to study the distraction potential of new voice-directed onboard functions and a program with Wake Forest University to develop a more comprehensive accident-reconstruction method using Toyota’s sophisticated modeling of human body structure.

In addition to these institutions and projects Toyota will also collaborate with Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Wayne State University School of Medicine and Washtenaw Area Transportation Study to name a few.