Toyota's city of tomorrow

Toyota's plan to build the world's most technologically advanced neighborhood on a 175-acre site at the base of Japan's Mount Fuji is a nod to the automaker's humble beginnings as a loom maker.

And the name of the project, Woven City, has another meaning.

Toyota Motor Corp. CEO Akio Toyoda, who flew to Las Vegas last week to personally introduce the ambitious plan at CES, pointed out that the company researches and tests artificial intelligence, mobility, robotics and other technologies in labs around the world.

"What if we had the opportunity to do it all in one place?" he said. "In a real-life environment, instead of a simulated one? This was on our mind when we were making plans to close a factory in Japan and we were wondering what to do with this soon-to-be-available land near Mount Fuji."

Woven City would be "a prototype town of the future where people live, work, play and participate in a living laboratory," Toyoda said. "This will be a truly unique opportunity to create an entire community or city from the ground up, and allow us to build an infrastructure of the future."

Unique concept

That component makes the Woven City concept unique among other vehicle test hubs, said Mark Boyadjis, global tech lead of automotive advisory services at IHS Markit. Other simulated sites test the tool — the vehicle — in a model of a modern city, he said. Toyota instead plans to test how the vehicle works as part of a city, connecting to the home and to the people living there.

"It's really hard to digitize the existing curb of today, but if you build the new curb, taking out the assumptions that current infrastructure has, that gives you an advantage," Boyadjis told Automotive News. "That's what this platform is.

"Does that mean that one day Toyota will one day be building a city themselves for broad-scale deployment? No. They very well could be a key partner in a lot of areas of that, but they need to understand the nuance of actually making this work together in harmony."

Woven City — which will be roughly the size of Apple's circular campus in Cupertino, Calif. — is being designed by renowned Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, CEO of Bjarke Ingels Group and designer of Google's new headquarters, 2 World Trade Center in New York City and other high-profile projects globally.

The cost of the project was not revealed, but it is expected to be in the billions of dollars. Toyota says an estimated 2,000 people — employees and their families, retired couples, retailers, visiting scientists and industry partners — are expected to inhabit Woven City initially when completed.

The project is expected to be built in phases, with groundbreaking on the first phase to start in 2021, Ingels said at CES. Residents are expected to begin moving in within about five years, Toyota executives said. Woven City is intended to be fully sustainable, Toyota says, with buildings constructed primarily of carbon-neutral wood built with "traditional Japanese wood joinery" along with robotic production methods. Rooftops will be covered in solar panels to generate electricity to complement that generated by hydrogen fuel cells.

Inside residences, robotics will assist with daily living. Toyota says homes will use sensor-based AI devices "to check occupants' health, take care of basic needs and enhance daily life." The company says the robotic assistants will be "an opportunity to deploy connected technology with integrity and trust, securely and positively."

Outdoors, Woven City's streets will be designated into three types: one reserved for faster vehicles, one that is parklike and reserved solely for pedestrians and a third designated for a mix of slower forms of personal mobility and pedestrian traffic. Only fully autonomous, zero-emission vehicles will be able to drive on the main roads, Toyota says, and autonomous Toyota e-Palette vehicles will be used for transportation and deliveries into Woven City.

Toyoda said the automaker will seek partnerships with "like-minded companies and individuals" who are interested in participating in the project.

"I truly believe this is a project that can benefit everyone, not just Toyota," he told reporters.

The automaker said it plans to "extend an open invitation to collaborate with other commercial and academic partners and invite interested scientists and researchers from around the world to come work on their own projects in this one-of-a-kind, real- world incubator."

Boyadjis of IHS called the project "very forward-looking" and said Toyota made clear it doesn't expect to pay for the Woven City project on its own.

Other automakers would be likely partners, as would companies that specialize in connected home technology, he said.

"They have so much to gain," Boyadjis said.

After the formal presentation in Las Vegas, project leaders explained that Japan's aging population presents a great way to test how such technologies can be helpful, and whether some might not be as populations age and average life spans are extended.

"The Japanese population is somewhat a little bit more inhabiting the future than the rest of us," said Ingels, the project's lead architect. "So I think in that sense there's a lot of elements that makes it really relevant from a sort of urban/social/architectural/demographic point of view, to study a city of the future in Japan."