Toyota made a $10 billion secret—what’s going on in there?

At the Consumer Electronics Show in 2020, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda promised to build the city of the future, a place where researchers, engineers, and scientists can live and work together. It was designed as the beginning of the transformation of the largest car company in the world, making it a successful driving company.

Six months ago, when Toyota spent about $10 billion to build an urban paradise on a disused factory, the first people moved in. One hundred hand-picked “Weavers”, residents who chose to improve the technology of the mini-metropolis, began to settle.

Last week, I got a chance to watch it. This is what I learned while wandering the streets of Toyota’s vision for the future.

The future is bright

As part of its transformation into a true mobility company, Toyota aims to become the world’s safest car manufacturer. The company says it wants to create a “non-accident”-long range because of the number of Toyotas currently on the road.

Woven City on a sunny day.

Credit: Toyota

“Statistically, autonomous vehicles are nowhere near the size of Toyota’s fleet of vehicles in the world,” John Absmeier, Woven City’s CTO, told me. While companies like Waymo are operating thousands of vehicles, Toyota’s autonomous fleet will need to operate at a much higher level, he said.

To get there, Absmeier said Toyota’s vehicles will need more information than avionics can provide, even with the world’s most advanced lidar, radar, and sensors. For example, the only way to watch a child get out of the back of a truck, he said, is to have cameras on every road looking for danger, combined with oncoming traffic warnings.

This is part of the old promise of traffic-to-anything messagesand in Woven City, Toyota is trying to implement that idea.

The future is a mystery

But if the idea of ​​ubiquitous cameras gives you pause, you’re not alone—it certainly surprised me. I counted eight different cameras at one intersection in Woven City, including many more mounted on the roofs of the buildings I visited. Even the small coffee shop on the property had half a dozen hanging overhead.