MSN 26/02/2021
Toyota has started constructing a 175-acre smart city in Japan that will work on artificial intelligence and futuristic technologies and serve as a “living laboratory”, the company has announced.
Construction began this week on the project dubbed “Woven City”, at a site at the base of Japan’s Mount Fuji, about 62 miles from Tokyo.
The city is being designed as a testing ground for technologies that could be rolled out across urban environments, including robotics, interconnected smart homes and artificial intelligence.
The company’s president Akio Toyoda broke ground at the site on Tuesday in a ceremony involving local officials of Shizuoka Prefecture, where the new city is located.
Toyota, which first announced the project at CES 2020 in January last year, says the city will have three types of roads which are all linked to each other at the ground level – one thoroughfare for pedestrians, one for pedestrians using personal mobility vehicles like e-scooters, and one dedicated solely to self-driving vehicles. The company said there would be one conventional road running underneath the city to provide goods transportation.
Toyota launched its own self-driving vehicle, the e-Palette, in 2018, and it is expected that they will make up the bulk of the Woven City project’s transport infrastructure. The company has previously described them as “scalable and customisable” for a range of functions include ride-sharing, delivery services and even mobile offices and hotels.
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