Toyota Motor Corp. builds Woven City, a prototype city of the future, at the former site of Toyota Motor East Japan Inc.’s Higashi-Fuji Plant, seen in the front, in Susono, Shizuoka Prefecture. This photo was taken on Feb. 11. (Koichi Ueda)
Toyota Motor Corp. has started building a prototype “city of the future,” an unusual move by an automaker to build an entire town from scratch and use it as a laboratory for cutting-edge technology.
In its new “Woven City” project, Toyota will test all sorts of state-of-the-art tech, including self-driving cars and artificial intelligence.
It plans to leverage the testing ground to craft new products and services so it can expand its business model, as the market becomes increasingly crowded by tech companies and other new players from outside of the traditional automobile sector.