Toyota Built a City From Scratch, But Is This $10 Billion Future Utopia Too Perfect to Work?

Toyota makes more cars than any other brand. It moved a massive 11 million vehicles last year, dwarfing basically every competitor on the planet. It’s far and away the biggest of the Japanese Big Three, producing more than twice as many cars as second-place Honda, and given that brand’s struggles of late, the gap is only likely to expand.

One hundred years ago, Sakichi Toyoda kicked off the family business by manufacturing wooden looms. Today, his son’s spin-off Toyota Motor Corporation is in an enviable position both globally and at home, and while the competition struggles to find its footing amid today's chaotic global market, Toyota is already putting the pieces in place for the next 100 years.

The biggest piece, literally, at least, is called Woven City. It covers 175 acres on a former factory site located a couple of hours southwest of Tokyo. It’s positioned as a city of the future and a living, breathing mobility testing ground. It bristles with autonomous robots, wild personal mobility devices, and enough cameras to make George Orwell blush. The intent, though, is less showcase and more proving ground. Akio Toyoda, Sakichi’s great-grandson, has said that he wants Toyota to transition from a motor company to a true mobility powerhouse, and this is where that transformation truly begins.

Factory Origin

Toyota’s Woven City was announced at CES 2020 by Akio Toyoda himself, who at the time was still president and CEO of Toyota Motor Corporation. The true origin of the site, though, goes back much further. Specifically, back to 1967, when the sprawling Higashi-Fuji factory was opened. Over the next 53 years of operation, it would churn out 7.5 million cars.

That plant produced some true Toyota icons, including the AE86 and the Century. Shifting logistics and priorities meant moving production to Toyota’s other venues, with the plant closing in 2020. Enter Woven City.

See All 6 Photos6

Toyota President and CEO Akio Toyoda (left) and Danish architect Bjarke Ingels reveal plans to build a prototype

After its 2020 announcement, Woven City’s construction began a year later, with the first phase completed last year. Total cost so far? Some estimates have placed it as high as $10 billion, but Toyota isn’t confirming any current price tags.

The first residents arrived late last year, or “Weavers” in Toyota-speak, and just last week, Toyota let the first international journalists onto the property to get the lay of the land. I was one of them.

Touring the Town

My tour of Woven City started at the so-called Inventor Garage. It’s a trendy rebranding for a big building that once housed Higashi-Fuji’s stamping machines. Where once sheets of metal were formed into fenders and other large components, today startups and innovators come together to meld minds and, theoretically, define the future of mobility—and other business segments, as well.

It’s a former factory building, but step inside, and the “former” bit is rather debatable. The concrete floor is still chewed up and splattered with aged paints, and the walls of the subterranean stamping stations are stained with machine lubricant spilled decades ago.

See All 6 Photos6

But amidst that authentic aesthetic, Toyota’s designers have reshaped and reformed the area in an effort to turn it into a modern space for modern pursuits. A concrete pit that previously housed a four-story-tall stamping machine has been transformed into a sort of amphitheater. A new, scooter-friendly ramp winds across the hall and up to a second floor, where a small hotel houses visiting innovators.

Endless desks and benches and spaces are meant to inspire chance meetings and collaboration. Many of the companies doing research at Woven City had set up a small expo of sorts with booths scattered about, highlighting everything from a hydrogen-powered bicycle to an AI-powered karaoke machine that will detect your mood and set the playlist accordingly. (The tech is intended for home use right now, but future in-car applications are a possibility.)

See All 6 Photos6

Amidst those startups, Toyota itself showed off its new Woven City AI Vision Engine, a platform designed to aggregate raw feeds from the countless cameras scattered about the place. The system generates reams of AI-generated annotations, describing what’s going on and, theoretically, preventing shoplifting in stores or automatically providing help in the case of a medical emergency.

Toyota also showed off the latest on its Arene OS, the platform that introduced in the new RAV4, intended to simplify the development of software-defined vehicles.

I saw prototype robots meant to carry things around the home, other robots for delivering things between them, and countless services and business ideas that could, someday, blow up to be the next great unicorn startup.

If there’s a one core mission for Woven City, though, it’s making sure things don’t blow up.

A Perfectly Safe Society

To get into Woven City, you need to scan a badge and pass a muster of security guards parked up at the main entrances. This is a place seemingly bereft of crime, but it’s a different type of urban safety that Toyota is chasing.

The company’s goal is to create a world with zero accidents, a pledge that gave me flashbacks to Volvo’s similar, sadly abandoned, Vision 2020. Where Volvo tried to hit its mark purely with safer and smarter cars, Toyota’s perspective is that no amount of onboard smarts or sensors can possibly prevent all accidents.

That brings us back to all those cameras. Woven City is something of an idealistic realization of decades of promises for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, the V2V and V2X systems that are more technically feasible than ever yet still seem no closer to reality than they were 20 years ago.

Here, the idea is that Toyota’s AI-powered vision engine could spot things like kids chasing balls or dogs running free, alerting oncoming cars well before even the most advanced onboard sensor could possibly detect trouble.

It’s extreme cases like this that today’s autonomous cars from Waymo and Tesla simply cannot account for. For Woven City, it’s a question of volume and risk. When you put 10 million vehicles into the world every year, small risks and rare corner cases have potentially huge ramifications.

Deploying cameras everywhere is one way to address extreme safety cases, but the core problems with V2V and V2X have never really been about the technology. They’ve been about getting the entire industry to agree on the right way to implement it and then finding ways for the already tapped budgets of various municipalities around the world to cover the cost of installing the necessary sensors to make it work.

Testing these systems in this city built by a single car company with infinitely deep pockets seems unlikely to solve those real issues.

Phase One

On my second day at Woven City, I had a little time to venture deeper into the residential area of town. Called Phase I, it’s the first set of buildings where the Weavers will live and eat and play, with an on-site restaurant, coffee shop, laundry facilities, and even a few of Japan’s ubiquitous convenience shops.

Phases two and three are currently under construction, signaled by the booms of backhoes looming over the fences that separate the finished areas from the expanses of rock and dirt that designate the city to come.

See All 6 Photos6

The completed streets are immaculate, marked with paint that looks like it’d never been driven over. It certainly isn’t seeing much use at present. A lonely bus made laps of the place, carrying no passengers, and thanks to the rain on my visiting day, not even Woven City’s many scooters and robots were running. It looked like a ghost town.

That’s partly because some of the activity happens underground. Daisuke Tanaka, one of the Woven City residents, told me you can get Amazon packages delivered even here. But the delivery person doesn’t come to your door. Instead, they drop everything off at Woven City’s central receiving area. From there, packages are handed off to subterranean robots, which skitter through new-age catacombs and deliver them right to the residents.

See All 6 Photos6

Tanaka told me those same robots can be used for a sort of storage system. Since on-site apartments are tiny, as is typical in Japan, residents can box up things they don’t need and hand them off to the robots. They’ll be whisked away today and stored for later retrieval.

Despite the rain, I did get a working demonstration of another robot, Guide Mobi. It acts like a tugboat for Woven City’s on-site car-sharing service, a fleet of white Toyota bZ4X EVs. Toyota wanted these cars to deliver themselves to the waiting customers, but since a bZ4X can’t drive itself, the Guide Mobi effectively leads the way. It cruises along at low speed, wirelessly controlling one of the electric SUVs, which follows along like a willing puppy.

See All 6 Photos6

The Guide Mobi has onboard Lidar, enabling it to see even through the rain that was bucketing down during my visit, ensuring the cars safely get from their parking spot to the designated pickup area on the curb outside. For Woven City’s residents, it means never needing to find a parking spot. But based on the general lack of activity, I can’t help thinking that wouldn’t be much of a problem, anyway.

An Undefined Future

Given how little action of any note—human or otherwise—I observed at Woven City, I left the place with more doubts than I had going into my visit. It’s hard to see it as a great venue to stress-test autonomous cars, given the pristine roads and desolate sidewalks. It’s also a curious place for testing micromobility given its tiny footprint (you can walk from one side to the other in minutes). Finally, while all those cameras could surely do a lot of good, anyone with even an adventurous attitude toward digital privacy will feel uneasy walking around here.

However, what makes Woven City so interesting is that it’s pointedly not trying to be any one thing. As a proving ground, I have my doubts it will truly ever make for safer cars in the real world. But as a melting pot of creators and their creations, this place feels like it could someday grow into something special. And, for Toyota, hopefully something very profitable.

Woven City feels like a massive, hugely expensive way for Toyota to find its next purpose. It all may seem a bit far-fetched at present, but the very name of the place is a clue as to how far Toyota is planning to evolve. Toyota was making wooden looms 100 years ago. Now, it makes some of the most reliable cars in the world, and more of them than anyone else. While it’s anybody’s guess what Toyota will be making 100 years from now, if indeed it’s making anything at all, it’ll probably start right here.