Toyota has done what no other carmaker dared to try — it has built an entire city. The first phase of Woven City is already up and running: the prototype town has risen in Japan's Shizuoka Prefecture, at the foot of Mount Fuji, on the site of Toyota Motor East Japan's former Higashi-Fuji plant.
The project is run by the subsidiary Woven by Toyota. The idea is as simple as it is audacious: Toyota no longer wants to be just a carmaker — it is aiming for the status of a mobility company. The concept was first shown at CES back in 2020. Back then it sounded like a futuristic dream. Now that dream has an address and residents.
So what kind of place is this, exactly? A living laboratory where ordinary residents — called Weavers — live side by side with Inventors, the teams and developers who create and road-test new products and services right here, before any possible mass launch. Around 100 people live in the city today, across 50 households. Over time the population is set to grow to roughly 300.
More than 20 Inventor teams have already joined the project — both Toyota's own divisions and outside partners. The list of fields is striking: autonomous driving, robotic logistics, next-generation communication systems, portable hydrogen power sources, safety technologies. And here is what lies behind it: the future of the industry is less and less about the cars themselves and more and more about the infrastructure around them.
