This is ‘Woven City’, a futuristic city that Toyota wants to build.
The estimated cost is around $10 billion.
That’s certainly impressive, but what’s truly extraordinary is the reason behind this project.
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The Japanese automaker set up a subsidiary company for this project, Woven Inc., that will solely focus on automated transportation.
Woven City is part of this project because its streets will serve as a testbed for Toyota’s autonomous vehicles.
Put simply, they want to make autonomous cars, and they’re building a whole city just to test those cars.
Autonomous cars will use dedicated lanes, separate from pedestrians and cyclists, and will regularly relay data and information to the manufacturer.
The goal is to make autonomous vehicles better, and of course safer.
The 175-acre (708,000 square meters) city, located in the Shizuoka Prefecture, in the foothills of Mount Fuji, will initially be home to 360 residents, most of them are Toyota employees, but will eventually welcome 2,000 people.
Toyota broke ground in 2021 at a site close to the foot of Japan’s Mount Fuji and aims to complete ‘Phase 1’ by the end of the year.
They haven’t given the project a specific deadline, and that’s probably for the better, because building cities from scratch isn’t exactly easy.
Even Saudi Arabia is facing some issues with ‘The Line’, with numerous reports now suggesting the city might end up being a lot smaller than initially planned.
And then there are those cities that became ghost towns.
In 2016, Malaysia launched a ‘$100 billion Forest City‘ that’s now completely abandoned.
Hopefully, things will go in a different direction for Toyota and its Woven City.
