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Toyota consistently nabs the title of the world’s best-selling car company.
But the Japanese automotive behemoth’s car business wasn’t the focus of Chairman Akio Toyoda’s presentation at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. Instead, Toyoda reminded the audience that he’d stood on the same stage five years before and announced plans for Toyota to construct a futuristic prototype city near the base of Mount Fuji in Japan.
Toyoda described “Woven City” as “a living laboratory where the residents are willing participants, giving inventors the opportunity to freely test their ideas in a secure, real-life setting.” And now it’s nearly ready to welcome its first residents.
Starting this fall, about 100 people––mostly Toyota employees and their family members––are slated to move to Woven City. The project’s first phase will include about 360 residents, and eventually could expand to 2,000, per the company. The project’s leaders envision entrepreneurs, startup employees, retirees, academics, and others eventually taking up residence alongside Toyota workers.
They’ll live and work on a site that previously was home to Toyota Motor East Japan’s Higashi-Fuji Plant in Susono City.
There, inventors will develop, test, and validate new mobility solutions for “people, goods, information, and energy,” according to Toyoda.
“We think of Woven City as a test course for mobility, where we can develop any number of solutions,” he said. Joby Aviation, an aviation startup in which Toyota is an investor, is involved in the project, and the concept has gotten interest from several manufacturers, according to a news release.
Toyoda also laid out a vision of Woven City residents testing emerging technologies in their own homes––like robot assistants that can help with mundane tasks like folding laundry. Autonomous transportation and logistics would be another area of focus.
Now, with an accelerator program for “external startups, entrepreneurs, universities, and research institutions” scheduled to start this summer, Toyota is starting to engage the “inventors” it envisions working on Woven City’s campus.
In some ways, the concept isn’t novel. But the establishment of a community in which retirees and employees’ family members would provide valuable insights into a slew of technologies and in-development solutions is somewhat unique, Sam Abuelsamid, VP of market research at Telemetry, told Tech Brew.
“That will give them an opportunity to get new feedback from different sources that they might not have gotten before,” he said. “And then go from there and learn more about how these concepts, how these technologies, actually work with normal people, not just the people who are working on it.”
The project, Toyoda acknowledged, may end up losing Toyota money.
“But that’s OK,” he said. “Because as global citizens, I believe Toyota has a responsibility to invest in our collective future, to share what we’ve learned with others, and support new ideas that benefit the planet and its people. And that, more than anything else, is why we created Woven City.”