Ambitious plans to build a utopian sustainable city at the foot of an active Japanese volcano are well on their way to completion.
First announced in 2021, Toyota has been hard at work constructing their Woven City just miles away from Mount Fuji on the island of Honshū, with the first of 2,000 anticipated residents now expected to move in before the end of the year.
News of the project’s imminent completion comes not long after photos were shared of progress being made on Saudi Arabia’s behemoth ‘mirror city’ project The Line, though they’re hardly the only megacities currently under construction around the world.
Marketed as a ‘mass human experiment’, Woven City will provide a ‘living laboratory’ for Toyota to test prototypes of their renewable and energy-efficient self-driving vehicles, dubbed ‘E-palettes’.
The car manufacturer expects to gather data from the use of these driverless cars, guided by sensors in lights, buildings and roads across the city.
This will help them better understand patterns in both automotive and pedestrian traffic.
Woven City is also expected to feature ‘smart homes’ running almost entirely on hydrogen, reducing emissions so that the futuristic habitation, with its whopping price tag of £7.8 billion, will be as sustainable and eco-friendly as possible.
Akio Toyoda, Toyota’s president, has said: ‘Building a complete city from the ground up, even on a small scale like this, is a unique opportunity to develop future technologies, including a digital operating system for the city’s infrastructure.
‘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 virtual and the physical realms, maximising its potential.’