The vast Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held in Las Vegas every January, has become a de facto motorcar show. Car makers have abandoned the traditional vast motor shows of old – such as Frankfurt and Geneva – and instead prefer to mix it with the cool kids of the tech world, rubbing shoulders with Nvidia, Apple, Google, and the likes.
Car companies have used CES to show off everything from new dashboard technology to full cars. This year, Honda is displaying both the new Afeela electric car that it’s making in collaboration with Sony (only for the American market so far) as well as the latest concept car in its 0 series of electric car previews.
This year, Toyota decided not to show up with a car. Toyota came to CES with a whole city.
Not literally, you understand. In 2020, also at CES (the last one before Covid-19 lockdowns) Toyota’s president, and then its chief executive, Akio Toyoda, announced that the company was going to make its own city. In 2025 that promise will start to come true, with the first residents of Woven City due to move in later this year.
This new city has been planned and built by Toyota at the foot of Mount Fuji, to the southwest of the vast urban sprawl of Japan’s capital. It’s designed to be a city designed around people, and one that minimises both its carbon footprint and any potential for congestion or transport issues. Initially, much of the promise of Woven City was tied to Toyota’s hydrogen plans, and the city itself was set to use hydrogen fuel cells for most of its power needs.
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In the five years since, hydrogen seems to have moved on to the back burner. At CES, Akio Toyoda’s speech announcing the first residents of Woven City made no mention of hydrogen. Toyoda – the grandson of the founder of Toyota – did mention lots of other exciting tech, however, and even compared himself to Taylor Swift.
That comparison was less to do with Toyoda’s musical ability, and more to do with the barrage of camera flashes that welcomed him on to the stage at CES. Perhaps even in his wildest dreams, Toyoda never thought he would be a rock star, but he’s now the impresario of a city.
“I’ll bet that when you hear the name Toyota, you probably think of words like dependability, value, or affordable transportation. In fact, I’m pretty sure that ‘prototype town of the future’ isn’t the first thing that pops into your head,” Toyoda said. “But five years ago, on this very stage, in this very room – and apparently I was wearing the same tie – I announced that Toyota would be building exactly that. We call it Woven City.
Toyoda went on to say that Woven City was “more than just a place to live, work and play” – it’s a “place where people can invent and develop all kinds of new products and ideas, a living laboratory where the residents are willing participants, giving inventors the opportunity to freely test their ideas in a secure, real-life setting”.
So while the first handful of residents who will move in this coming autumn will be employees of Toyota and their families – about 100 initially, expected to grow to more than than 2,000 by 2026 – Woven City is not merely a glorified dormitory town for those working at Toyota.
Instead, it’s better thought of as both an experiment – into carbon reduction and transport logistics – and a start-up hothouse. Toyota has already confirmed that several industries are interested in locating in Woven City, from air conditioning manufacturer Daikin Industries, to education provider Zoshinkai Holdings already signed up, and the likes of ENEOS Corporation, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), and Rinnai Corporation all expressing interest.
That’s what Woven City is truly for – a place where Toyota people can rub shoulders and share space with other companies, in the hope of driving innovation. Toyoda even said at CES that it doesn’t really matter if the building of the city turns out to be a financial loss for Toyota (his exact words were: “Maybe not. That’s Okay”) because the theory is that the innovations that arise from the city will pay much bigger dividends down the line.
While hydrogen has taken a back seat, artificial intelligence is now – unsurprisingly – to the fore when it comes to Woven City, with Toyoda promising developments such as: “Personal mobility devices like a wheelchair race car, because everybody should experience the joy of going fast, to drones that safely escort you home at night, to interactive pet robots that provide support and companionship for the elderly, to flying cars like [the] one made by our friends at Joby, making the trip from Woven City to Tokyo fast and traffic free.”
Toyoda even mentioned an in-house robot that has been taught how to precisely fold T-shirts, simply by watching a human instructor do the same.
Given Toyoda’s well-known enthusiasm for cars, he also sought to reassure those of a more traditional bent that all this tech wouldn’t take away the fun. “Between you and me, as Toyota’s master driver, I’ve personally thought autonomous vehicles were a bit, you know, boring ... until our team showed me these two Toyota race cars that drift autonomously. As the kids would say, that slaps, and I’m totally here for it!”
Toyoda also announced two new AI software developments – called Arene and Vision AI – which respectively create a digital twin of the real world and can use that to work out how new innovations will slot into place, and a system that combines video data analysis with artificial intelligence to better understand the movement behaviour of people and objects.
Toyoda finished by reminding his audience why this new tech development is called Woven City.
“We didn’t start out by making cars [it traces its roots back to the Toyoda Spinning and Weaving Company in 1918]; we began by weaving fabric. That’s why we think of the future residents of Woven City as weavers. Because much like test drivers for cars, our residents will be the ones who use and experience the new products and services our inventors develop, and will play a critical role in pulling all the threads together. For me, at its core, Woven City is about collaboration. It’s about the opportunity to weave together diverse points of view, talents and abilities, to create a new kind of fabric for our future.”
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