For the Athletes’ Village at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, Toyota deployed a fleet of e-Palette all-electric and autonomous vehicles to shuttle participants to and from events. It was meant to show the future of the automaker's mobility services. However, all e-Palette operations have been suspended after one of the vehicles collided with a pedestrian on Thursday, according to an official statement. The e-Palette hit a visually impaired pedestrian who was "about to cross a pedestrian crossing," the statement read. While stopped at a T-intersection, the e-Palette's human operator apparently collided with the athlete when they went to make a turn while going "at around one or two kilometers an hour," and that the athlete was able to walk back to where they were staying after being taken into treatment, reports Reuters, citing a video statement from Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda. The athlete reportedly did not lose consciousness.
The Toyota e-Palette was announced at CES in 2018 and debuted at the 2019 Tokyo Motor Show. For the Olympics, it was used as a loop-line bus service to transport people around the Olympic compound during the games. It runs on fully electric power and has autonomous abilities. A December 2020 press release stated the vehicles allowed for "a single person to manage several vehicles, rather than one person continually monitoring one vehicle, which enables operation with fewer workers," though it appears as though the e-Palette, in this case, was manned by a human. A Toyota spokesperson said that, despite the e-Palette's current suspended operations, "we have not announced that we will be stopping our efforts in future mobility."
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