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2023

Toyota Connected Reimagines Mobility on AWS

Using AWS services, Toyota Connected built a resilient, scalable, and cost-optimized mobility services platform that uses data insights to improve safety and convenience and increase mobility for its individual and fleet customers.

Benefits

  • Single platform to support all vehicle data
  • Increased agility
  • Seamless scalability
  • 70–80% cost-of-ownership savings
  • Pays only for amount of services used

Overview

Toyota Connected, leading Toyota’s transition from an automotive company to a mobility services business, used Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its core infrastructure on its Toyota Mobility Services Platform, which functions as a single platform for bringing valuable services to drivers.The ability to handle large datasets and also scale to more vehicles and fleets was a hurdle for Toyota. “The volume of the data is huge; it quickly escalates costs,” says Mahadevan Krishnan, principal architect of Toyota Connected, in his presentation at AWS re:Invent 2020. By using AWS solutions, Toyota Connected could handle the scale without a major cost increase. The company chose a serverless computing architecture, which increases agility, provides flexibility to scale, and lowers costs by 70–80 percent.

About Toyota Connected

Toyota Connected leads the development of Toyota’s cloud-based digital Toyota Mobility Services Platform. Toyota Connected is leading Toyota’s transformation from an automotive to a mobility company.

Opportunity | Evolving from an Automotive to a Mobility Services Business

In 2018, Toyota began its transition from an automotive to a mobility services business, redefining value for the customer. Through its Toyota Mobility Services Platform, Toyota Connected can offer personalized, localized, and predictive data to enhance the driving experience.

Building new services on Toyota Mobility Services Platform involves using purpose-built AWS services and optimizing the solution across the dimensions of cost and performance simultaneously. “Architecture evolves. It’s an iterative process until you find what works best,” says AWS Chief Architect Sandeep Kulkarni.

Since beginning development in 2018, Toyota Connected’s use of AWS solutions has increased by three times. Using AWS services, Toyota was able to seamlessly scale to 18 times its usual traffic volume, with 18 billion transactions per month running through the platform.

Solution | Ability to Scale without Incurring Prohibitive Costs

Toyota Connected uses AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service that enables companies to run code without provisioning or managing servers; it also uses Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (Amazon KDS), a real-time data streaming service, to capture data and enable analytics.

“The data is being collected to build data services for customers that really drive satisfaction and provide new capabilities around safety and convenience,” says Krishnan, “and to take insights from the data and start improving the products.”

Using AWS services enables Toyota Connected to improve safety, enhance convenience, and increase mobility for individuals and fleets worldwide. For instance, car dealers or fleet-management companies can use sensor data to ensure employees are driving at safe and reasonable speeds and can notify rental car companies of proactive maintenance that keeps vehicles operating smoothly for customers.

Outcome | Increasing Traffic, APIs, and Use of AWS Services

Going forward, Toyota Connected plans on using additional AWS services to simplify data administration and management and to innovate in other areas, such as Internet of Things technology.

As the data traffic continues to ramp up, Toyota Connected will continue to use AWS for resilient, scalable platforms while lowering costs. “It’s simply remarkable to see how well AWS has scaled to meet Toyota’s needs seamlessly from hundreds of thousands of vehicles when we started to millions of vehicles now,” Kulkarni says.

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The data is being collected to build data services for customers that really drive satisfaction and provide new capabilities around safety and convenience.
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Mahadevan Krishnan

Principal Architect, Toyota Connected