TOYOTA Will Build Textile City Near Mt Fuji. There Will Be Three Types Of Channels.

January 8th, according to foreign media reports, most car manufacturers have their own test lanes, but TOYOTA has bigger ideas: transforming an old factory into an intelligent city, where people will live, work and study new transport technologies.

TOYOTA named the city "Woven City", a high-tech Pioneering Park with an area of about 710 thousand square meters, and is scheduled to start construction in 2021. The city is designed by Big, a famous Danish architect, Bjarke Ingels. The company also designed the latest Google headquarters and two World Trade Center building, Kubiak Ingalls.

Big and TOYOTA have designed how the city works. In order to travel, there will be three types of passageways. The first is the channel for automatic driving; the second is for personal mobile devices, such as bicycles and motorcycles. The third one will be a park style walkway. In cities, all these channels will be interlaced to meet the traffic needs of everyone.

This city will not be used for TOYOTA only. Akiotoyoda, President and chief executive of TOYOTA, said that researchers and partners will be invited to launch various experiments in the new city.

The future city will have buildings built with sustainable timber to inherit the tradition of building timber in Japan and use solar panels to provide energy. Families living in the city will also try to use AI technology and robots. They are supposed to help residents deal with things like dumping garbage, setting temperatures for refrigerators, and even checking residents' health.

A few years ago, an unmanned concept food vehicle named E-Pallet, launched by TOYOTA at CES (International Consumer Electronics Exhibition), will become the mobile retail site of the city. A number of E-Pallet will be gathered in the city square, which will become the shopping mall of the city, which is a bit like the farm market.

There will be hydrogen batteries and water filtration systems for power storage and distribution under the city. It will also be a logistics center, which can be sent to families through a group of micro robots or transmissions.

Building a complete city for people to live, work and research is a bit of a crazy idea. But Akiotoyoda seemed to be excited about it, though he knew that the audience might think he was a little crazy. Whether crazy or not, this is an interesting experiment on how to build cities in the future, or at least an interesting display on CES.