Toyota built a $10 billion private utopia—what’s going on in there?
Woven City is a privacy nightmare but could be helpful to an OEM desperate to be more.
Toyota provided flights from Albany, New York, to Tokyo and accommodation so Ars could visit Woven City. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in 2020, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda pledged to build a city of the future, a place where researchers, engineers, and scientists could live and work together. It was framed as the start of a transformation for the world's largest car company, moving it toward becoming a fully fledged mobility company.
Six months ago, after Toyota spent an estimated $10 billion to build an urban paradise atop a disused factory, the first residents moved in. One-hundred handpicked "Weavers," residents chosen to boost the tech cred of the sensor-laden mini-metropolis, began settling in.
Last week, I got a chance to check it out. Here's what I learned while wandering the streets of Toyota's vision of the future.
This story was first published by Ars Technica. Read the original report