Woven City near Mount Fuji is where Japanese carmaker Toyota plans to test everyday living with robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous zero-emissions transport.
Advertisement
Daisuke Toyoda, an executive in charge of the project from the automaker’s founding family, stressed it’s not “a smart city.”
“We’re making a test course for mobility so that’s a little bit different. We’re not a real estate developer,” he said on Saturday during a tour of the facility, where the first phase of construction was completed.
The first phase spans 47,000 square metres, roughly the size of about five baseball fields. When completed, it will be 294,000 square metres.
Built on the grounds of a closed Toyota Motor Corp. auto plant, it’s meant to be a place where researchers and start-ups come together to share ideas, according to Toyoda.
Advertisement
Ambitious plans for futuristic cities have sputtered or are unfinished, including one proposed by Google’s parent company Alphabet in Toronto, “Neom” in Saudi Arabia, a project near San Francisco spearheaded by a former Goldman Sachs trader, and Masdar City next to Abu Dhabi’s airport.
