Toyota's futuristic "smart city" featuring the latest green technologies, including hydrogen power and driverless vehicles, is expected to welcome its first residents by the end of this year.
Located on Honshū Island, Japan, the carmaker's sustainable "Woven City" sits just miles from Mount Fuji and will serve as a "living laboratory" for residents and researchers to test advanced technologies — including driverless cars, robotics, smart homes, and artificial intelligence — in a real-world setting, per a company news release.
When Toyota began planning the prototype city of the future in 2020, it envisioned a "fully connected ecosystem" where people could brainstorm ideas, products, and services that improve mobility in urban environments.
According to Toyota's website detailing the project, the city will offer two different mechanisms for innovation and development: the Woven Test Course and the Woven Inventor Garage. The test course will resemble an actual city, complete with shopping centers, homes, businesses, offices, and a central park, and the latter will provide a research and development hub for inventors. Both areas encourage human connection and cooperation to reshape intracity travel.
"The various support provided by Woven City will accelerate the development of technology and service innovations that will redefine the future of mobility and lead to wellbeing for all," Toyota said on the project website.
With that in mind, Woven City's streets are designated by three zones to make travel safer and more efficient. Some streets are designed only for autonomous, zero-pollution vehicles known as e-Palettes, others for low-speed, mixed-use travel such as bicycling and walking, and several roads will feature paved public areas just for pedestrians, per Toyota.
This street design weaves together to create a seamless grid formation, which the automaker says will make it easier to collect data on the city's mobility patterns.
In addition to being much more pedestrian-friendly than typical large cities, Woven City will feature eco-friendly smart homes made mostly from wood to reduce their carbon pollution. Hydrogen fuel cells will provide most of the power, although each residence will have rooftop solar panels for additional energy.
Residents can also enjoy cutting-edge AI technology, such as in-home robotics and sensors, to make daily life easier and enable communication across the city.
All of these green technologies will ensure the city uses fully sustainable power, helping to curb heat-trapping gases that are making extreme weather more frequent and contributing to numerous health problems for humans.
Toyota plans to accommodate 2,000 residents in Woven City — including Toyota employees and their families, retirees, business owners, scientists, and industry partners — and welcome more people in the future.
Construction of the Woven Test Course is set to be finished by the end of the year, and a soft launch is planned for 2025, per the company. However, Interesting Engineering cited a report from Express that said the first residents will move in by the end of 2024.
"A swarm of different technologies are beginning to radically change how we inhabit and navigate our cities. Connected, autonomous, emission-free and shared mobility solutions are bound to unleash a world of opportunities for new forms of urban life," Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, who was commissioned to design Woven City, said in Toyota's news release.
Futuristic megacities are popping up all over the globe, from California to Africa to the Middle East. As humanity continues its march toward a sustainable future where planet-overheating fuels no longer power our world, we can expect more smart cities to be built in which humans, plants, and wildlife can coexist peacefully.
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