Toyota designs car wash for autonomous cars

Toyota has filed a new patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for an invention for a car wash that will automatically clean your autonomous car in the future without any human input, either in the cleaning or behind the wheel.

Unimaginatively called the "car wash judgement system", the Toyota car wash of the future will 'talk' to the car that needs cleaning in advance of it arriving at the cleaning facility.

The chat is designed to ascertain how dirty the vehicle is, and what sort of clean it needs.

If the car has recently travelled on dirt roads, it will communicate that directly to the Toyota car wash.

The car will then be booked in, with the car wash knowing precisely when it will arrive, thanks to live updates from its sat-nav.

Once there, the autonomous vehicle will be guided by the car wash into a bay and receive a wash that will focus on the areas already communicated.

According to the patent, the need for the specific car wash for autonomous cars is not all about convenience.

In the future, Toyota predicts a decline in car ownership and a rise of car sharing.

This will make it difficult to monitor the condition of the fleet, which could extend to hundreds of vehicles parked in a wide range of locations.

Thanks to the new tech, the fleet operator will be able to hand over the car cleaning to both the car itself and the Toyota car wash system.