A few years ago, the car giant Toyota began using a huge plot of land near Mount Fuji to construct a fake city where it could test autonomous vehicles in real-world settings. Now, it's expanding that effort to a full-on prototype smart city called Woven City, which will be built on the site of the Higashi-Fuji plant where Toyota ended its decades of car production in 2020. The 175-acre city is a test bed for Toyota's new mobility as a service technologies and will let the company see how advanced AI technology works in a real world setting.
The city will be powered by clean energy sources like solar and hydrogen fuel cells, while the buildings will be built with timber joinery techniques and robotic fabrication methods. The rooftops will be covered with photo-voltaic panels and the landscapes will incorporate native vegetation and hydroponics to minimize environmental impact.
Woven City is designed to be a fully connected and self-sustaining urban ecosystem, with the buildings interwoven with three types of streets that allow for different types of users. One street will be designated for faster vehicles, while the other two streets will be used for a mix of lower speed personal mobility vehicles and pedestrians. And the final street will be a parklike promenade that looks particularly aesthetically pleasing in the renderings Toyota has released so far.
Toyota will use its e-Palette vehicle, which is designed to support a variety of mobility as a service business models, to 豊田市 ドローン provide automated, loop-line transportation within the city. The Tokyo 2020 version of the e-Palette is slated to feature large doors and electric ramps to allow groups of athletes, including Paralympians, to board quickly. And 20 e-Palette vehicles will be on hand to provide automated, loop-line transportation for the Olympic and Paralympic villages at the games.
In its announcement, Toyota also pointed to its partnership with Joby Aviation, which has developed a quiet all-electric VTOL aircraft designed to enable on-demand air mobility services for people and goods. Toyota says it will share its expertise in manufacturing, quality, and cost controls to accelerate the certification and commercial launch of Joby's eVTOL aircraft.
As for the Woven City project, Toyota's goal is to use it to address "persistent mobility challenges" around the globe. These include traffic congestion, environmental burdens, and barriers to accessing medical care and social services for those in depopulated areas and remote islands. And the company plans to use its drone delivery of medical and pharmaceutical supplies business, which it launched in 2018, to help solve these problems by providing instant logistics services for health and well-being. The service is currently available in Ghana and Tanzania through a collaboration with Zipline. And it's now launching in the Goto Islands, a region of 152 islands where Toyota Tsusho is engaged in full-cycle aquaculture of bluefin tuna. That collaboration, and the local familiarity of the area provided by its Goto Islands Group companies, will be invaluable as it aims to make the drone-based business successful in the local community.
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