Construction completed: First residents to move into Toyota's model city
Toyota is building a living laboratory. The Group wants to use it to research the mobility of the future – and is also going under the rocket builders to do so.
(Image: Toyota)
Even the tie is the same as five years ago. In the room where Akio Toyoda once presented the plans for "his" model city, he can now announce: "Woven City" is ready. With this huge infrastructure project, car manufacturer Toyota wants to explore the mobility of the future. At CES 2025, Toyoda, CEO of the company, has now announced the completion of phase 1, the construction of the city.
Toyota wants to test new technologies under real-life conditions in the networked small city. "Woven City" is being built at the foot of Mount Fuji on the one square kilometer site of a former Toyota factory. Now that the first construction phase has been completed, "Woven City" only covers 50,000 square meters and will later grow to more than 700,000 square meters.
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The fully networked infrastructure will draw most of its energy from hydrogen fuel cells. As a "living laboratory", people will one day live and work in the city as normal. Future-oriented technologies such as autonomous mobility, robotics, smart homes, smart cities and artificial intelligence will be researched. Once the construction phase is complete, the first 100 people are expected to move into the city over the course of the year, mainly current or former Toyota employees. According to Toyota's plans, the population will later grow to 2,000.
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Toyoda renewed his invitation to other companies and researchers to participate in the "Woven City". "This is the only way we can come up with ideas that we would never have thought of on our own to improve life on our planet," said Toyoda. One of the early partners is the Japanese telecommunications group NTT, which is pursuing a common goal with Toyota: To bundle their know-how gained from "Woven City" and form an open platform for smart cities. This will use AI to evaluate city data and enable urban planning through simulation with the "digital twin" function.
In the networked city, Toyota not only wants to work on mobility in the city, but also on mobility beyond the earth. For example, Toyoda announced in a half-sentence that Toyota had invested in Interstellar Technologies Inc. and wanted to contribute Toyota's know-how for the mass production of rockets.
Heise Medien is the official media partner of CES 2025.
(rbr)
