Toyota’s Woven City: The Ultimate Futuristic Experiment You Can’t Escape
Hello everyone. So, Toyota decided that simply making cars that go vroom (or now, hum quietly on batteries and hydrogen) was far too pedestrian. Instead, they’ve decided to channel their inner video game developer and roll out a real-life DLC pack called “Woven City,” sitting there smugly at the base of Mount Fuji. Yes, Mount Fuji – the place where you now need to cough up cash to climb to the summit because apparently your footsteps were lagging the server.
Phase 1 – The Tutorial Level
After years of dropping teaser trailers at trade shows like CES, Phase 1 is now complete, and this slightly terrifying future-city is opening for business on September 25th. It’s parked next to Toyota’s Shizuoka Prefecture plant, meaning the commute for employees is basically fast travel. The idea? “Expand the mobility concept beyond transportation.” Translation: Toyota’s tired of just making cars; they want to see if they can design your life too – and probably patch it later when the bugs come in.
Corporate Co-op Mode
Apparently “mobility” in Toyota-speak includes rockets (Interstellar Technologies), animal meds (Kyoritsu Seiyaku), coffee (UCC Japan), air conditioning (Daikin – because subtlety is dead), and instant noodles (Nissin). Somewhere in the boardroom someone said, “Sure, throw them all in, it’ll be fun.” It sounds less like a cohesive vision for the future and more like random NPC spawns in a sandbox game.
The Living Laboratory – No, You’re the Guinea Pig
Instead of commandeering real streets for their autonomous toy cars, Toyota has gone full god-mode and built their own city. It’s powered by solar and hydrogen because they’re still clinging to that hydrogen dream like a gamer clings to the promise of Half-Life 3. The playground covers 294,000 square meters and will be crawling with delivery robots, autonomous EVs, and probably a few designers in lab coats breathing heavily into clipboards.
Gameplay Design: City Layout
There are three types of streets: speed lanes for fast vehicles (think Need for Speed without the cop chases), personal mobility zones (glorified scooter tracks), and pedestrian areas, nestled together in an “organic pattern” – which in urban design usually means “like spaghetti, but more expensive.” Everything is autonomous, everything is emission-free, and presumably everything is watching and reporting back on you because nothing says “future of humanity” like comprehensive data harvesting dressed up as convenience.
Population and The Sims Vibes
Phase 1 is starting with around 360 residents – mostly Toyota employees and their families – living in ‘Japandi’-style houses packed with health monitoring and domestic robots. Perfect if you ever wanted your toaster to judge your cholesterol. Future phases promise to expand the settlement to about 2,000 residents. At this point it’s sounding like a massive social experiment you didn’t consent to join – The Sims: Corporate Edition.
Phase 2 – DLC Incoming
The next phase ramps up the population and crams in more buildings and tech. By 2026, Toyota wants to let outsiders come visit, presumably to generate hype and perhaps lease you a futuristic coffee machine you didn’t need. There’s no expectation of immediate profit – which is corporate speak for “this is a tech prototype we’ll milk for branding before selling you the bits in your next Corolla.”
Final Diagnosis
As a doctor, I’ll say this: from a medical perspective, the concept is fascinating – a closed-loop environment to test technology’s effect on daily life. From a gamer’s lens? It’s ambitious but risks suffering the No Man’s Sky launch problem: promising the universe, delivering a patchwork. As for conspiracy theories – if you don’t think part of this is about controlling the data and behavior of a model population, you’re probably still using Internet Explorer.
Overall impression? Intriguing tech testbed, slightly dystopian overtones, and a whiff of “because we can” hubris. It might work, it might flop, but either way, the patch notes will be entertaining.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is entirely my opinion.
Article source: Toyota ha construido la ciudad del futuro a los pies del monte Fuji: vivirán 2.000 personas como conejillos de indias, https://www.xataka.com/movilidad/toyota-ha-construido-ciudad-futuro-a-pies-monte-fuji-viviran-2-000-personas-como-conejillos-indias
