When the world’s biggest car company envisages a technological utopia and plans to build its own city, this reality may be closer than we think.

It was shortly after lunchtime on 6 January 2020, when the president of Toyota, Akio Toyoda, took to the Las Vegas stage of the world’s most influential tech event.

“Virtually every industry is trying to predict the future,” said the energetic leader of the Japanese car giant. Arms open, he wore a wide, diagonally striped tie and a precisely tailored, single-button, charcoal suit.

“From my perspective, no one wants a crystal ball as much as the automobile industry. Everyone wants to know … when will cars truly drive themselves? When will they know what I’m thinking? When will they fly?”

Toyoda wasn’t actually striding the CES 2020 stage to unveil a flying car. In some ways, however, his announcement was far more profound.

The world’s biggest car company, Toyoda said, would build its own prototype city of the future – creating an entire community from the ground up, and building an infrastructure that would be connected, digital and sustainable.

Toyota’s dream is to create a place where people can live, work, play and participate in a real-world living laboratory.

Up to 2,000 people will reside there, including Toyota employees and their families.

It will enable researchers, engineers and scientists from around the world to come together to test and develop new technologies, such as mobility as a service, robotics, connected smart homes and artificial intelligence.

Toyota's 'Woven City':

Dubbed Woven City, Toyota’s project has been designed by famed Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and is being constructed on a 71-hectare site (a former car factory) at the foot of Mount Fuji.

Toyoda referred to Woven City as “A test track for a mobility company”, ensuring safety for the vehicles, the roads on which they’re being driven, and the people.

“We didn’t think that safe autonomous driving is achievable unless you make a human-centered city and test it there,” he said. “That was the number one motivation behind deciding to build this Woven City.”

Now well on the way to becoming a reality, Woven City is also a key part of Toyota’s strategy for achieving carbon neutrality.

In December 2021, Toyoda said the global company would expand options for carbon-neutral vehicles by offering a full line-up of battery-powered electric vehicles (BEVs).

“Our goal is not only to reduce CO2 emissions and other negative impacts to zero,” he said. “Our goal goes beyond those.”

Building on Toyota’s expertise with hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) technology, plug-in hybrid (PHEV), and fuel-cell vehicles, Woven City will show how this might work day-to-day.

It will be sustainably powered – largely by rooftop solar and the company’s groundbreaking hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicle (FCEV) technology – and function as a sort of living lab.

It will be a place where Toyota – in collaboration with other business partners – will test how a greener future will work for the people who live there.

“With people, buildings and vehicles all connected and communicating with each other through data and sensors, we will be able to test connected AI technology in both the virtual and the physical realms,” Toyoda said.

The city’s development will be intriguing. But its fundamentals are already a working blueprint for tomorrow, showing how everyday life will evolve.

Toyota is merging battery power with autonomous vehicles, serving Woven City citizens with swarms of Toyota’s self-driving e-Palette BEVs.

Revealed by Toyoda at CES 2018, Toyota’s free-roaming e-Palette is a “fully automated, next-generation battery-electric vehicle designed to be scalable and customisable”, the company says.

Think of a transparent cube on wheels, of various sizes according to purpose, that zooms about, performing multiple “mobile retail” services: as a taxi; as mobile, come-to-you, dermatologist’s rooms; as a literal Thai chef-in-a-box who whips up your gaeng keow gai on the move; as a try-it-on shoe store on wheels.

“Just think how good e-Palette would be at Burning Man,” Toyoda quipped at the time.

That combination of electric and autonomous tech is well advanced – and has widespread buy-in.

Even in 2018, Toyota had agreements to collaborate on its e-Palettes with delivery giants from Amazon to Uber to Pizza Hut.

In the future, car ownership for personal transport will be unnecessary for some people, a change Toyota is staying ahead of. And one that will mean many public roadways can be repurposed – with fewer, high-speed, dedicated commuter autobahns, and more green and pedestrian space.

Like the cars, our cities will have to embrace green power, probably in a more decentralised way. So vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, technology will be commonplace, supplanting any need to buy an independent battery for your home to stockpile solar energy for evening use.

Instead, you’ll use the battery in your BEV to store power, charged throughout the day by rooftop panels.

Even current BEVs will typically contain enough capacity to power an average home for a couple of days. (V2G capability has been mandated in Japan for years for BEVs and PHEVs; the technology is expected in Australia this year.)

Those houses will change, too, in composition, function and connectivity.

To minimise their carbon footprint, Ingles – the architect behind 2 World Trade Centre, Denmark’s Lego House, and Google’s 97,000 sq metre campus in Sunnydale, California – sees future buildings, like those in Woven City, championing wooden construction.

Rooftops will obviously be festooned in photovoltaic solar panels, but new materials mean that even transparent glass could transform the way buildings generate solar power.

The inside of buildings at Woven City will be “equipped with the latest in human support technologies, such as in-home robotics to assist with daily living”, Toyota says.

“Homes will use sensor-based AI to check occupants’ health, take care of basic needs and enhance daily life, creating an opportunity to deploy connected technology with integrity and trust, securely and positively.”

To help that overall goal, and to give its pioneering work in sustainable propulsion the best chance to cut through, Toyota has also engaged in a royalty-free arrangement to share 24,000 electrification patents.

It’s a remarkable piece of transparency that embodies Toyota’s ambitious attitude to change.

Toyoda’s CES 2018 address wasn’t just about the e-Palette.

Two years before his Woven City announcement, the company president and CEO, and great-grandson of its founder, also announced Toyota’s “Once-in-a-century” plans to evolve from the world’s biggest automaker to something more progressive.

One with a detailed global zero-emissions 2050 target, and a six-point outline to embrace overall sustainability in line with what will be required of all of us to reach climate targets.

“It’s my goal to transition Toyota from an automobile company to a mobility company,” Toyoda said. “And the possibilities of what we can build, in my mind, are endless.”