Mobilesyrup: “Toyota’s moment in the sun at CES came when it showed off its plans to develop a 175-acre smart city packed full of futuristic concepts.”
The company is calling it the Toyota Woven City, and it’s partnered with Danish design firm Bjarke Ingels Group, which has worked with Google and a few other projects in Canada.
Tucked into the shadow of Mt. Fuji in Japan was one of the company’s shuttered factories. It plans to replace it with what Akio Toyota, the president of Toyota Motor Corporation, has taken to calling a “living laboratory.”
During a round table, the designer Bjarke Ingels mentioned that cities have always been shaped based on how people move around in them. Ingels and the rest of the Toyota team think that making vehicles drive themselves will free up more space for people to walk and, in turn, a better-designed city. The idea of the Woven City is to put humans at the centre of the design.
There are numerous tech angles to take, but one of the defining aspects of the city is well designed urban planning.
The company states there will be three main transportation pathways in the city and all of them revolve around humans. The first will be for cars, and according to the company’s renders, they’ll be thinner than typical roads and lined by trees.
It will only be self-driving vehicles in the city since it want to be a testbed for what future cities can be. Since the streets are thinner there’s also space for people to walk. The second pathway is for smaller forms of urban mobility like bikes, scooters and walking.
To power the city, Toyota plans to use a mix of solar panels and underground hydrogen fuel cells. The rooftops will be covered in solar panels to gather energy from the sun, and the rest of the city utilizes hydrogen power. The hydrogen cells will be stored underneath the city, where Toyota also plans to build a network of autonomous delivery robots to help bring packages and food to the residents living above.