At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, you might have expected Toyota to show off a new car or maybe some clever piece of in-car entertainment tech. Nope, instead Toyota is showing off a whole city.
First announced in 2020
The plans for what Toyota calls its ‘Woven City’ were first unveiled in 2020, and at CES 2025, Toyota’s famed president, Akio Toyoda, took to the Vegas stage to announce that the first phase of construction of this new city, located at the base of Mount Fuji, just outside Tokyo, is nearing completion.
Blinded by the flashes of cameras as he took to the stage, Toyoda — grandson of the Japanese company’s founder — said he ‘felt like Taylor Swift.’
“I'll bet that when you hear the name Toyota… you probably think of words like dependability, value, or affordable transportation. In fact, I'm pretty sure that ‘prototype town of the future’ isn't the first thing that pops into your head” said Toyoda. “But five years ago, on this very stage, in this very room, I announced that Toyota would be building exactly that. We call it Woven City.”
The name comes from the fact that long before Toyota built cars, it built weaving looms for the fabric industry. It’s a city designed around easy and simple mobility, with an emphasis on lowering the emissions needed for people to get around, live, and work.
Robot tech
Toyoda also said that the Woven City will be a test bed for how to better integrated new technologies into everyday life, including: “In-home robotics, to assist with daily life. In fact, we're currently developing robots that learn everyday tasks through camera assisted, human demonstration. For example, folding clothes is one task we take very seriously in Japan. So one of our team members [used] hand held cameras to show our robots the Japanese way to fold a t-shirt and the robot, the next day, after studying the data that was sent to it, learned overnight, how to execute a three-point fold perfectly.”
Toyoda also spoke of other concepts, such as robotic pets to help ease loneliness in older life, to drones that automatically escort people home after a night out, to flying cars and even: “Personal mobility devices like a wheelchair racecar because everybody should experience the joy of going fast!”
Autonomous drift cars
Toyoda also revealed that Toyota engineers are working on trying to make autonomous self-driving cars a little more interesting… “Now, between you and me, as Toyota's Master Driver, I've personally thought autonomous vehicles were a bit…vyou know… boring,” said Toyoda. “Until our team showed me these two Toyota race cars that drift autonomously. I mean, as the kids would say that slaps, and I'm totally here for it!”
Toyoda said that the company’s autonomous vehicles would be helped in their development by a new ‘digital twin’ system called Arene, which replicates real-world environments in cyberspace so that they can be compared and contrasted to see what’s different. There’s also a new Vision AI which combines video data analysis with artificial intelligence to better understand the movement behaviour of people and objects.
Toyoda admitted that the Woven City isn’t something that’s going to make any money for Toyota, if indeed it ever does, but the idea is less about profit and more about collaboration. The plan is that the Woven City will become something of a hub for other high-tech industries, with which Toyota can collaborate on future concepts. Several Japanese companies have already signed up for leases in the Woven City and the plan already seems to be working — not only has the Woven City already received a Japanese government ‘Platinum’ certification for its ‘environmentally conscious and human-centric design aimed at enhancing people's overall quality of life’, but at CES Toyoda also announced a collaboration with Interstellar Technologies Inc, which will see the two companies designing and producing actual, real space rockets.
Collaboration on future ideas
Toyoda’s idea is that more and more people with big ideas will be drawn to the Woven City because of its quality of life and low environmental impact. “Much like test drivers for cars, our residents will be the ones who use and experience the new products and services our inventors develop and will play a critical role in pulling all the threads together” said Toyoda. “That's why we think of the future residents of Woven City as weavers. We didn't start out by making cars, we began by weaving fabric.Toyota will soon be celebrating it's 100th year anniversary, not as a car company but as the inventor of the world's first automatic loom. For me, at its core, Woven City is about collaboration. I’s about the opportunity to weave together diverse points of view, talents and abilities to create a new kind of fabric for our future. So today, I say to anyone in any corner of the world, inspired or excited to make a difference, make a change, or make it count — please consider this your official invitation, to join us at Woven City.”
The first residents — around 100 Toyota employees and their families — should be moving in this coming autumn, with the total population set to exceed 2,000 some time in 2026.