Toyota Motor Corp unveiled on Thursday new models of Lexus and Mirai in Japan, equipped with advanced driver assistance, as competition heats up to develop more selfdriving and connected cars.

Toyotas latest launch comes as automakers, electric car startups and tech giants invest heavily in socalled active safety features.

The Japanese carmakers new driving assist technology, or Advanced Drive, features a level 2 autonomous system that helps driving, such as limiting the car in its lane, maintaining the distance from other vehicles and changing lanes under the drivers supervision on expressways or other motorvehicle only roads.

The luxury sedan Lexus LS will be on sale from Thursday, costing between about 16.3 million yen 148,627.70 and 17.9 million yen, while the secondgeneration Mirai hydrogen fuel cell car will be offered on April 12 at between 8.4 million and 8.6 million yen.

The new models are Toyotas first products brought to the market that provide overtheair updates and utilise AI technology centred on deep learning, said Toyota executive James Kuffner, who is also the head of Toyotas research unit Woven Planet.

This is really an important first step in our journey towards softwarefirst development, he said at an online briefing on Thursday, adding that the company has tried to design the software to be truly global and to provide reusability.

In the future, software features on cars will be upgradable and more customisable much like how people personalise…